


Neverwhere

by magnum12



Category: Game of Thrones (TV), Neverwhere - Neil Gaiman
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Death, F/M, Fantasy, Jon Snow is Not a Targaryen, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-04-22 06:57:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14303301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnum12/pseuds/magnum12
Summary: Jon Snow is a young, successful businessman, on a right path to a comfortable life - nice job, beautiful fiancée. But when he meets a mysterious girl, a single act of kindness catapults him out of his workday existence and into a world that is eerily familiar and utterly bizarre at once.Will he find his way back to his old life, or will the world he thought only existed in fairy tales capture him?





	1. London

**Author's Note:**

> BASED ON NEIL GAIMAN'S NEVERWHERE!
> 
> So I read this book and loved it! Unintentionally, it starts similar to my other fic, Before You, but after chapter 2 it will take a totally different direction! I would say it's similar to Narnia or HP - total fantasy world! The first few chapters will be based on the book, but later I will take it to other directions, add or leave things out of the story.  
> Also, don't be surprised, Jon will be a little OOC but only at the beggining.
> 
> HUGE THANKS to Open_Sky for helping me with this! :)
> 
> Hope you enjoy and tell me what you think! :)

_Prologue_

 

It was the night before he moved to London. Jon Snow laid in his bed in the middle of the night and tried to fight down the urge to puke. Every time he opened his eyes, it felt like the room was a roller-coaster.

 

The night started nicely though, in a pub somewhere downtown of Winterfell, a little village in far north England. He and his friends enjoyed their night out, for which the sole-reason was the celebration of the start of his new life in London tomorrow. Beer after beer, shot after shot, and he found himself unable to take any more. So he decided to head home not long after midnight, luckily, his friends were wasted enough to not really care about it.

 

That’s how he found himself in his current state, curled up in his bed, debating the advantages and disadvantages of throwing up. He must have thought about it for quite a long time, because he realized he fell asleep, weird dreams invading his mind yet again.

 

_He was walking down the street in Winterfell, feeling a little disoriented. Suddenly, he felt water dripping on his shoulders, and as he looked up to the sky, he saw rain started pouring heavily. He quickly moved under a little roof in a dark alley. He swore and shook himself to get rid of the droplets of water on him when he noticed he was not alone. There was a woman sitting on the ground, her face covered in street dirt. She was covered with blankets and was dressed in all kind of clothing – she probably put on everything she found on the streets._

_"Do you have some change for an old lady, kind sir?" she asked._

_Jon looked at her, and despite her state, her eyes seemed honest and kind. So he searched his pockets and gave her a few coins._

_"Oh, thank you, dear, you are a good man" she smiled as she took the coins from his hand. "Are you alright, dear, you seem a little dizzy."_

_"I’m fine, thank you. I just had a few drinks with my friends" Jon said._

_"Well, you were so kind to me, let me repay you." the woman said kindle while holding out a hand for him. "Give me your hand and I’ll tell you your future."_

_Without even thinking much about it, Jon found himself reaching for the woman with his right hand. With palm up, he put his hand on the woman's hand. She started to examine it, first looking surprised, then serious and confused, then surprised again._

_"Oh, dear, you have a long road ahead of you." she started with a wrinkled forehead._

_"Yes, I’m moving to London tomorrow." Jon nodded._

_The old woman looked up at him then. It was a look that made Jon think she was seeing right through him, his soul and mind. It made him a little uncomfortable, and the fact that she kept looking at him for long seconds didn’t help._

_"Yes, London. But not the London I know." she said then, looking at his palm again. "It will start with doors." she sighed. "If I were you, I would fear them."_

_"Doors?" Jon asked confused._

_She nodded. The rain started to fell even harder, pattering on the roofs and on the asphalt of the road. "I'd watch out for doors if I were you."_

_"Doors." she confirmed firmly._

_"Alright." Jon said, even though he didn’t really know what to do with the new found information. "I will watch out, thank you."_

_Just as the rain stopped, he realized all that time he held an umbrella in his other hand. It was white, with London’s underground system printed on it. He got it from his friends in the pub, as kind of a goodbye and good luck gift. He was about to leave the alley when he turned back and gave it to the mysterious woman. It would come in more useful to her._

_He took one last glance at her, then continued his way to his apartment._

_"Doors." he thought. "Why be afraid of doors?"_

 

***

 

The loud ringing of his phone woke him up. He sat up to search for it on his nightstand and groaned with every movement. He finally found it after a few very loud and agonizing moments, and the following silence was the sweetest sound he ever heard. If it wasn’t for the train, he would have stayed in bed for hours, but he had to get up, it was time to start his new life in London. He quickly got ready, all the while wishing he would already be on the train where he could get more sleep for at least 5 or 6 hours.

 

He looked around his apartment one last time, but before he closed the door, he realized that he didn’t have the umbrella with him. He searched for it, but couldn’t find it anywhere. Then he remembered his dream – or was it a dream? Maybe not. Maybe it happened on his way home last night in his drunken state. He looked at his watch and afraid he would be late, he shrugged and closed the door behind him.

 

***

 

The three years since he moved to London didn’t really change Jon. His view of the city, on the other hand, did change. Before moving, he thought he will hate it, but it was necessary for his job. He thought London will be dark and lifeless, filled with bored people living their boring everyday lives. But after a few months, he realized he couldn’t have been more wrong. London was colorful, with its red buses, red mailboxes, black taxis and green parks.

 

It had everything a city needed to be one of the cultural centers of the world. Streets filled with museums, exhibitions, restaurants, and statues no one really cared about anymore. The first year went by and Jon was proud he didn’t visit any of the monuments. Being from Winterfell, he never liked going to museums or galleries. But everything changed with Ygritte.

 

They met in a museum in London, while accidentally bumping into each other. Their relationship was inevitable from that moment, so in the weekends, Jon often found himself going to places like the Tate or even the Louvre with her, rather than staying in to watch TV and relax. Though in places like that the only thing he learned that going there will have your legs hurt and that it’s incredibly expensive to buy something at the museum’s cafeteria.

 

"Here’s your coffee," he said to Ygritte. "I’m just saying, for that money we could have easily had two hamburgers elsewhere."

 

"You know I don’t eat that kind of stuff, silly." she said happily.

 

"I should have bought a chocolate cake too, so they could buy a new Van Gogh.”

 

On those weekends when they didn’t go to museums or theaters, he accompanied Ygritte on shopping rounds. She was fierce, beautiful and confident, and she definitely knew where her life was going. She knew what she wanted and Jon often didn’t understand why she wanted him. Whenever they laid in bed after they made love, they told they love the other. Or at least they both believed they did.

 

Jon had been awed by Ygritte, who was beautiful, and often quite funny, and was certainly going somewhere. And Ygritte saw in Jon an enormous amount of potential, which, properly harnessed by the right woman, would have made him the perfect matrimonial accessory.

 

If only he were a little more focused, she would murmur to herself, and so she gave him books with titles like Dress for Success and A Hundred and Twenty-Five Habits of Successful Men, and books on how to run a business like a military campaign, and Jon always said thank you, and always intended to read them. In Harvey Nichols's men's fashion department she would pick out for him the kinds of clothes she thought that he should wear—and he wore them, during the week, anyway.

 

And, a year to the day after their first encounter, she told him she thought it was time that they went shopping for an engagement ring.

 

 

***

 

"Why are you with her?" Sam asked from his desk. "She’s terrifying."

 

"She’s very sweet if you get to know her." Jon said while shuffling with some papers. He was in a hurry, it was already late afternoon and he should have been done by noon.

 

"I'm always so freaked out by her." Sam admitted. "Doesn't she complain about them? he asked as he pointed his fingers to the direction of Jon's desk.

 

"No, it never came up." he answered. But actually, the subject had indeed come up. Ygritte had, however, convinced herself that Jon's wolf collection was a mark of endearing eccentricity. After all, she was organizing an exhibition for Mr. Mance’s angel collection. It was the biggest angel themed collection in the world - paintings, statues with modern angels, mythological, biblical – anything a person can think of. And Mr. Mance is a very successful man, so she thought maybe Jon having this weird hobby wasn’t a bad thing after all.

 

In actuality, Jon didn't really collect those little wolf figures. He found one of them on the sidewalk on his way to work a few months ago, and in an attempt to make his workplace more familiar, he put it on his computer. Others must have noticed it, and from then, they gifted him with those- for his birthday he received more than a dozen.

 

"She's different, she's lovely." he added. Ygritte must have sensed Jon was talking about her because his phone started to ring and as he looked at the screen, Ygritte's picture looked back at him. "Hey, honey."

 

"Just Ygritte, Jon, you know I hate nicknames, they're so degrading." her voice rang through. "So, about tonight. When should we meet?"

 

Tonight? What's tonight? He must have forgotten some plans, so instinctively, he looked at her framed picture on his desk. Her face was behind a yellow post-it. On the note, a place and time were written clearly.

 

"Jon? You confirmed our reservation for tonight, right? I've told you a thousand times."

 

"Yeah, of course, I did." No, he didn't. He completely forgot about it.

 

"Good, I don't want to wait for you again." she reminded him again, that one time when he was running late for their dinner. Of course, she waited in warm, cozy restaurant, and he was the one who was running to her in the rain. And it was only 15 minutes. "I'll come over around 7, okay? Please be ready and presentable."

 

"Of course." he answered and with that, she ended the call.

 

Jon immediately called the restaurant, trying to make another reservation. They were polite, most definitely annoyed, and said that he should have made his reservation months ago. They made him think that if the pope himself or the prime minister went there tonight, they would have asked them to leave, too. After almost 10 minutes of convincing, they agreed if he pays another 50, the will ensure his previous reservation.

 

***

 

"Jon?"

 

"Hey, Jon?"

 

Jon was still working on those damn papers when he heard Sam.

 

"Jon, it's six-thirty." Sam warned him.

 

"It's what now?"

 

Papers and pens and spreadsheets and wolf figures were tumbled into Jon's briefcase. He snapped it shut and ran.

He pulled his coat on as he went. Sam was following. "Are we going to have that drink, then?"

 

Jon paused for a moment. If ever, he decided, they made disorganization an Olympic sport, he could be disorganized for Britain.

 

"Sam," he said, "I'm sorry. I blew it. I have to see Ygritte tonight. We're taking her boss out to dinner."

 

"Mister Mance? Of Mance's? The Mance?" Jon nodded. They hurried down the stairs. "I'm sure you'll have fun," said Sam, insincerely.

 

They reached the lobby, and Jon made a dash for the automatic doors, which spectacularly failed to open.

 

 _Doors. It will start with doors._ He suddenly remembered - he still wasn't sure it was a dream or a memory all those years ago.

 

Mr. Kovacs, the building's security guard inspected their signatures and satisfied himself they had nothing on them to steal, then he pressed a button under his desk, and the door slid open.

 

"Doors" Jon said to himself again but soon forgot about it as he made it to a taxi.

 

***

 

He ran up the stairs and into his apartment. He was already shedding clothes as he entered the hall: his briefcase spun across the room and crash-landed on the sofa; he took his keys from his pocket and placed them carefully on the hall table, in order to ensure he wouldn’t forget them. Then he dashed into the bedroom. The buzzer sounded. Jon, three-quarters of the way into his best suit, launched himself at the speaker.

 

"Jon? It's Ygitte, I'm here. I hope you're ready."

 

"Oh. Yes. Be right down." He pulled on a coat, and he ran, slamming the door behind him. Ygritte was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. She always waited for him there. Ygritte didn't like Jon's apartment: it made her feel uncomfortably female. There was always the chance of finding a pair of Jon's underwear, well, anywhere. No, it was not Ygritte's kind of place.

 

Ygritte checked her watch and increased her pace as they walked down the streets.

 

"There wasn't any problem with the reservations, was there?" asked Ygritte. And Jon, who was not much good at lying when faced with a direct question, said,

"Ah."

 

Ygritte and Jon walked down the sidewalk toward the restaurant. She had her arm through his and was walking as fast as her heels permitted. He hurried to keep up.

 

"You are honestly telling me you had to promise them an extra fifty pounds for our table tonight?" said Ygritte, her eyes flashing.

 

"They had lost my reservation. And they said all the tables were booked." Their steps echoed off the high walls.

 

"They'll probably have us sitting by the kitchen." said Ygritte.

 

"Or the door. Did you tell them it was for Mister Mance?"

 

"Yes," replied Jon.

 

Ygritte sighed. She continued to drag him along, as a door out of nowhere opened in the wall, a little way ahead of them.

 

A woman stepped out and stood swaying for one long terrible moment, all the while looking at Jon, locking her eyes with his.

 

He saw hurt and fear in them.

 

She then collapsed to the concrete. Jon shivered and stopped in his tracks.

 

 _Where did she come from?_ Jon looked back at the wall, there was no door.

 

_Doors. It will start with doors._

 

Ygritte tugged him into motion.

 

"Now, when you're talking to Mister Mance, you must make sure you don't interrupt him. Or disagree with him—he doesn't like to be disagreed with. When he makes a joke, laugh. If you're in any doubt as to whether or not he's made a joke, look at me."

 

He didn't move, no matter how hard Ygritte pulled him, while she didn't stop talking. Like she didn't even care about the woman on the ground in front of them. "Ygritte?"

 

 He could not believe that she was simply ignoring the figure at their feet.

 

"What?" She was not pleased to be jerked out of her reverie.

 

"Look."

 

He pointed to the sidewalk. The person was face down. Ygritte took his arm and tugged him toward her. "Oh. I see. If you pay them any attention, Jon, they'll walk all over you. They all have homes, really. Once she's slept it off, I'm sure she'll be fine."

 

Ygritte continued, "Now, I've told Mister Mance that we . . . "

 

Jon was down on one knee. "Jon? What are you doing?"

 

"She isn't drunk," said Jon. "She's hurt." He looked at his fingertips. "She's bleeding."

 

Ygritte looked down at him, nervous and puzzled. "We're going to be late," she pointed out.

 

"She's hurt." he said again firmly as he looked down at the woman. She was so petite and looked so small like this, like a little bird. Her silver hair was covered in blood, but still, he saw it was shiny and probably very soft underneath.

 

Ygritte looked back at the girl on the sidewalk. "Jon. We're going to be late. Someone else will be along; someone else will help her."

 

The girl's face was crusted with dirt, and her clothes were wet with blood. "She's hurt," he said, simply. There was an expression on his face Ygritte have never seen before.

 

"Call an ambulance then. Quickly, now."

 

Suddenly the girl's eyes opened, wide and shining in a face that was little more than a smudge of dust and blood. "Not a hospital, please. They'll find me. Take me somewhere safe. Please." Her voice was weak.

 

"You're bleeding," said Jon.  "Why not a hospital?"

 

"Help me?" the girl whispered and her eyes closed. He didn't know what to do. Where did she come from? She just simply walked out of the wall? No, that's stupid.

 

He contemplated Ygritte's words. He should call the ambulance, he knew he should. But as he remembered the woman's purple eyes, like a magnet, drawing him closer and closer... He didn't understand why no hospital, but she looked so desperate and scared. He couldn't find it in himself to let her go if she didn't want to.

 

"Why don't you want to go to the hospital?" This time there was no answer at all.

 

"Jon? What are you doing?" Ygritte asked angrily.

 

Jon had picked the girl up, cradling her in his arms. She was surprisingly light.

 

"I'm taking her back to my place, Ygritte. I can't just leave her. Tell Mister Mance I'm really sorry, but it was an emergency. I'm sure he'll understand."

 

"Jon Snow!" said Ygritte, slowly, her voice cold. "You put that girl down and come back here. Right. Away. Or this engagement is at an end as of now. I'm warning you."

 

Jon felt the sticky warmth of blood soaking into his shirt. Sometimes, he realized, there is nothing you can do. He walked away, leaving Ygritte behind.

 

Why was she so cold? The girl was obviously injured, how could Ygritte suggest they just leave her there?

 

He should just have called the police, or an ambulance.

 

It was dangerous to lift an injured person.

 

He had really, seriously upset Ygritte.

 

After a while, he was at the ground floor door of his building, and he was stumbling up the staircase, and then he was standing in front of the door to his apartment and realizing that he had left his keys on the hall table, inside . . .

 

The girl reached out one filthy hand to the door, and it swung open.

 

Never thought I'd be pleased that the door hadn't latched properly, thought Jon, and he carried the girl in—closing the door behind him with his foot—and put her down on his bed. His shirtfront was soaked in blood. She seemed semiconscious; her eyes were closed but fluttering. He peeled off her leather jacket. There was a long cut on her left upper arm and shoulder. Jon caught his breath.

 

"Look, I'm going to call a doctor," he said quietly. "Can you hear me?"

 

Her eyes opened, wide and scared. "Please, no. It'll be fine. It's not as bad as it looks. I just need sleep. No doctors."

 

"But your arm...your shoulder..."

 

"I'll be fine. Tomorrow. Please?" It was little more than a whisper.

 

"Um, I suppose, all right," he said.

 

She was asleep. Jon took an old scarf from his closet and wrapped it firmly around her left upper arm and shoulder; he did not want her to bleed to death on his bed before he could get her to a doctor. And then he tiptoed out of his bedroom and shut the door behind him.

 

He sat down on the sofa, in front of the television, and wondered what he had done.

 

***

 

So that was the first chapter! Hope you liked the beggining, tell me what you think! :)

Also, in this fic, the little things are very important! Look out for the tiny details! ;)


	2. The Escape

Ramsay had hired Drogo at the last market, which had been held on the Trafalgar Square not long ago.

 

He was huge and extremely grubby, his dirty face and waist-length black hair could’ve used a big wash.  He spoke very little, although he had made a point of telling each of them that he liked to kill things, and he was good at it, which amused Ramsay and Viserys to no end.

 

Mr. Drogo went first, in his filthy T-shirt and his crusted blue-jeans, and Ramsay and Viserys walked behind him, in their elegant black suits.

 

There are three simple ways for the observant to tell Ramsay and Viserys apart: first, Viserys is one head taller than Ramsay; second, Ramsay has eyes of a faded china blue, while Viserys's eyes are purple; third, while Viserys fashioned the rings he wears on his right hand out of the skulls of three dragons, Ramsay has no obvious jewelery.

 

So, they look nothing at all alike.

 

They were walking in the forest, a little behind their newfound ‘companion’.

 

"Buckle up, Ramsay." Viserys said. "We have things to damage."

 

"...and people to kill."

 

***

 

She had been running for days now. She was exhausted and scared, but she didn't stop to rest. If she stops, they will catch up to her in no time. She was running through passages, dark forests, mazes, trying to escape.

 

Her mind was suddenly filled with the images of her family. She felt the wet tears running down her cheeks, her vision became blurry which made it harder to run for safety. Then she felt the strength leave her body, her family's memory weakening her.

 

She barely realized she came to a halt. She couldn’t continue; her limbs felt heavy and numb, her vision blurred.

 

_I have to rest today so I can run again tomorrow._

 

_I have to. For them._

 

She was in a forest now, she heard the howling of wolves. To her relief, aside from the nature's sounds, there was nothing else. Not a sound from her chasers.

 

_Maybe they finally gave up._

 

But she knew that was a naive wish, they will chase her until they catch her.

 

After a few minutes of searching, she finally found some kind of shelter. She spotted a hollow in a big tree just in time her legs would give up. She slipped in, it was definitely not comfortable but it would make for at least a few hours.

 

As she made a ball of herself in the hole, hugging her legs close to her chest, she thought about her family again.

 

_Mother, father, brother_ she thought. _I'll avenge you. I'll bring justice to our family._

 

Ever since that day, this has been always the last thing on her mind before falling asleep.

 

***

 

In her dream, they were all together in the house. Her parents and her brother. They were standing together in the ballroom, staring at her. She looked around, studying their faces, they were all so pale, so grave.

 

She misses all of them so, so much.

 

Rhaella, her mother, touched her cheek and told her that she was in danger. In her dream, Daenerys laughed and said she knew. Her mother shook her head.

 

"No, no honey, you're in danger - right now!" her mother's voice rang through the ballroom. It was not the sweet, calm voice she remembered her mother had, but a voice urgent and scared.

 

"It doesn't matter...I miss you." she cried as she leaned her cheek against her mother's hand. She missed her soft touch. "I'll stay here, with you."

 

"You know you can't." Daenerys's father, Aerys said while walking closer to her to put a hand on her shoulder. "They'll be there soon. Wake up, Daenerys."

 

"You have to wake up."

 

Dany opened her eyes. She held her breath as she heard the fallen leaves rattle under the three men's shoes.

 

_Perhaps they won't notice me, she thought. Perhaps they'll go away._

 

And then she thought, desperately, _I'm hungry._

 

The footsteps hesitated. She was well-hidden, she knew, in the big tree. Yet as the footsteps came closer, she started to realize what she will probably have to do, and it scared her.

 

Abruptly, a hand grabbed her and pulled her out of her hiding place.

 

She tried to fight, but she couldn't get away from the man's iron grip. She looked up at the blank, bearded face, which creased into a vicious smile. He released her then, and she fell back hard to the ground. Daenerys felt a sharp pain in her back.

 

After just a fraction of a second, she saw the knife in the man's hand. He hovered above her like a tower. She rolled then when she saw the knife coming dangerously close to her chest. She twisted on the ground, and the knife blade, aimed at her chest, caught her in the upper arm. The pain was almost unbearable at that moment because she was tired and sad and hungry, already thinking about giving up. But then she thought about her dream, her family again. She can't give up.

 

The man's angry cursing made her focus again, making her temporarily forget all the pain.

 

Until that moment, she had never thought she could do it. Never thought she would be brave enough, or scared enough, or desperate enough to dare. But she reached up one hand to his chest, and she opened it . . .

 

He gasped, and tumbled onto her. It was wet and warm and slippery, and she slithered and staggered out from under the man, and she stumbled, trying again to run away.

 

The other two - who watched the scene from a few steps away - shouted after her.

 

"You can't hide from us forever."

 

"We'll give you a few minutes, to make the chase interesting again." Daenerys heard them say with an evil laugh. The laugh she heard many times and knew oh so well.

 

***

 

She finally found her way out of the forest.

 

She caught her breath in a tunnel, narrow and low, as she fell against the wall, breathing in gasps and sobs. Killing that man had taken the last of her strength; now she was spent. Her shoulder was beginning to throb. The knife, she thought. But she was safe.

 

"My, oh my." said a voice from the darkness on her right. "She survived Mr. Drogo."

 

"Well I never thought she would make it that far." said a flat voice on her left.

 

A light was kindled and flickered. "Still." said one, his eyes gleaming in the dark beneath the earth. "She won't survive us."

 

Daenerys kneed him, hard, in the groin: and then she pushed herself forward, her right hand holding her left shoulder.

 

And she ran.

 

She heard the two men again from behind her, this time they only laughed. They were like hyenas, exhausting their prey. They could wait. They had all the time in the world.

 

***

 

 She climbed down under the streets, to the tunnels.

 

Naturally, she would find her way in the tunnels with her eyes closed but now she was scared and injured.

 

It was like a maze, dark and confusing, branched and divided; she picked her way at random, ducking through tunnels, running and stumbling and weaving.

 

Behind her strolled her chasers. She knew they were calm and cheerful as Victorian dignitaries visiting the Crystal Palace exhibition. What she also knew is that they really had nothing to hurry about, because what they simply have to do when they arrived at a crossroads is that one of them would kneel and find the nearest spot of blood, and they would follow it.

 

 "Bless me, Viserys… She's slowing down."

 

"Hmm, yeah...She is slowing down, Ramsay."

 

Daenerys heard them say from not far.

 

"She must have lost a lot of blood."

 

"Not long now."

 

A click: the sound of a switchblade opening, empty and lonely and dark.

 

 ***

 

 She had chosen wrongly the last time - the corridor ended in a blank wall. Normally that would hardly have given her pause, but she was so tired, so hungry, in so much pain . . . She leaned against the wall, feeling the brick's roughness against her face. She was gulping breath, hiccupping and sobbing. Her arm was cold, and her left hand was numb. She could go no farther, and the world was beginning to feel very distant. She wanted to stop, to lie down, and to sleep for a hundred years. She promised not to give up, never to give up, but as she heard the two men coming closer and closer, she realized she can't do anything to escape them.

 

"Oh, bless my little black soul, do you see what I see, Ramsay?" The voice was soft, close: they must have been nearer to her than she had imagined.

 

"Yeah, I see something there… Something that's going to be—"

 

"Dead in a minute." said the flat voice, from above her.

 

"Our principal will be delighted."

 

It will be over soon. She will join her family and find her peace away from all the pain.

 

Before Daenerys knew what she was doing, she pulled whatever she could find deep inside her soul, from all the pain and the hurt, and the fear. She was spent, burnt out, and utterly exhausted. She had nowhere to go, no power left, no time.

 

"If it's the last door I open," she prayed, silently. "Let it open to somewhere . . . anywhere . . . safe . . . " and then she thought, wildly,

 

"Somebody."

 

And, as she began to pass out, she tried to open a door.

As the darkness took her, she heard one of the men's voice, as if from a long way away. 

 

"Pinch me, she's getting away." he said.

 

***

 

Voices.

 

She felt someone holding her.

 

She felt that someone cradling her in his arms, her cheek was against his warm chest. It was a man, Daenerys could make it out of the voices but she was too weak to open her eyes.

 

"...call an ambulance then...quickly, now...." she heard a woman's voice.

 

To that, Dany opened her eyes wide. No, no, no hospital.

 

They wouldn't be able to do anything there.

 

"Not a hospital, please. They'll find me. Take me somewhere safe. Please." Her voice was weak. She looked up at the man. She held her breath as her purple eyes found his brown ones.

 

She remembered the last thing she wished before she opened the door.

 

_"Somebody."_ And as she looked into those eyes, she knew her wish was granted. She couldn't explain it - maybe it was the monetary relief that she was away from the tunnels or the man's warm hands and his firm hold on her - but she felt safe. 

 

"You're bleeding," Daenerys heard him say.  "Why not a hospital?"

 

 She would explain it, but he wouldn't believe her. He would think she's crazy.

 

"Help me?" she whispered instead. She didn't wait for his answer as darkness claimed her again.

 

She didn't really know what happened next.

 

Her vision was blurry whenever she managed to force her eyes to open. All she could focus on was the man's presence, his arms around her and the throbbing pain in her arm. She rested her head in the crook of his neck, feeling his heartbeat pulsate against her eyelids.

 

They were in front of a door, and after just standing there a few minutes, she realized he can't open it.

 

_Keys...they're useless things_ she thought.

 

She took a deep breath and gathered all her strength. She reached out for the lock and brushed it with her fingers. The door opened, and she closed her eyes again.

 

"Look, I'm going to call a doctor." the man said quietly. "Can you hear me?"

 

She opened her eyes to the sound.

 

"Please, no. It'll be fine. It's not as bad as it looks. I just need sleep. No doctors."

 

She looked at the man again, he was leaning over her. She was laying on a bed now, she felt relaxed and comfortable despite the pain in her arm.

 

He looked like a knight in shining armor. Or at least now, to her, he did. Daenerys looked him up quickly. She realized he must be around the same age as her, his features a complete opposite to hers. While she had silver hair and purple eyes, he had dark, brown curls and deep brown eyes. She found his presence strangely calming her.

 

"But your arm...your shoulder..." she heard him say.

 

"I'll be fine. Tomorrow. Please?" she answered, feeling tired, and finding it hard to keep her eyes open.

 

"Um, I suppose, all right," she relaxed when she heard him answer.

 

And with that, she fell asleep.

 

***

 

_NOTE_

_So, yeah, that was Dany’s POV! In chapter 3 we will move forward in the story :)_

_Hope you liked it! I will try to update again this weekend, with a much longer chapter!_  
  
_And again, big thanks to Open_Sky!!_  


	3. Strange Day

He is somewhere in the darkness, running through the woods again. He feels carefree and happy like he never felt before. He always feels this way, whenever he has these dreams - he's a wolf, a big wolf running. It always seems so real, just like now.

 

He can feel the ground beneath his paws, the wind hitting his face, the air tickling his fur. Sometimes he catches himself wishing these dreams were his reality, wishing he was a simple wolf, living in the woods, not caring about the everyday troubles humans have to face from day to day. The constant pressure he feels these days to get a promotion, to get married in a year, buy a house in three and then start a family. With Ygritte, they planned everything out. They would have two children, a boy, and a girl, and they would move out to the suburbs, to Harrow or Croydon or Hampstead or even as far away as distant Reading. And it would not be a bad life. He knows that, too.

 

Still, sometimes he feels it would not be enough.

 

He comes to a halt when he feels that familiar scent again. He sniffs the air and feels how it fills his nostrils then, before he knows it, he starts running again. After a few minutes, he notices someone not far from him. He can't really make out the person's features as he slows down in front of the figure, but feels the hand on his head, gently rubbing his white fur. It's soothing, like when your mother gives you a hug, or when you get cozy on a bed with your loved one pressed against you.

 

"Here you are," the person says to him. Jon - the wolf - leans into the person's touch. "It's time to go."

 

He closes his eyes to enjoy the moment.

 

When he opened his eyes, he was not asleep anymore. He was a human again, lying on his couch in his apartment.

 

Jon sat up on the couch, gasping for breath. The curtains were still drawn, the lights and the television still on, but he could tell, from the pale light coming in through the cracks, that it was morning. He fumbled on the couch for the remote control, which had wedged itself into the small of his back during the night, and he turned off the television. He wiped away the sleep from his eyes and took stock of himself, pleased to notice that he had at least taken off his shoes and jacket before he had fallen asleep. His shirtfront was covered with dirt and dried blood.

 

That's when the previous night's events came back. He looked up to the direction of his bedroom, and his heart almost stopped when he saw the homeless girl standing not far away. She didn't say anything, only stared at him. He looked back, trying to take the whole situation in. She looked pale and weak, but still strangely beautiful with her silver hair in wild waves down her back and with her piercing purple eyes. They held so much familiarity, but he couldn't tell why.

 

She was dressed in a variety of clothes thrown at each other: jeans that looked really old, shirt on a shirt, with holes in them and on all of it a grey hoodie stained with her blood.

 

She looked, Jon thought, as if she'd done a midnight raid on the lost and found, wearing everything she'd taken. Despite her state, Jon thought she was one of the most beautiful women he has ever seen. Her current appearance was a huge contrast to her features. Jon cleared his throat to chase the thought away.

 

"Hey," he said quietly. He got up from the couch. His eyes met the girl's, who looked surprised when he spoke. "You look better."

 

"You can see me?" she asked, looking at him with wide eyes.

 

"See...you...?" Jon didn't really understand what she meant. "Of course I can."

 

"Are you from below too, then?"

 

"Below?" Jon asked. Maybe she hit her head. Or Ygritte was right and she really was a drunken person who was not exactly right in the mind. "I'm from Winterfell, I moved here a few years ago."

 

The girl looked only stared at him for a few moments, she looked confused. She looked around then, her eyes searched the apartment. "Where's _here_ exactly? Where are we?"

 

She looked around her suspiciously. "Where am I?"

 

"Newton Mansions, Little Comden Street..." He stopped.

 

She had opened the curtains, blinking at the cold daylight. The girl stared out at the rather ordinary view from Jon's window, astonished, peering wide-eyed at the cars and the buses and the tiny sprawl of shops – a bakery, a drugstore and a liquor store – below them.

 

"I'm in London Above." she said, in a small voice.

 

"Yes, you're in London," Jon said. _Above what?_ he wondered. "I think maybe you were in shock or something last night. That is a serious cut on your arm." He waited for her to say something, to explain. She glanced at him, and then looked back down at the buses and the shops. "I, um, found you on the streets. There was a lot of blood." Jon continued.

 

"Don't worry," she said, seriously. "Most of the blood was someone else's."

 

Jon looked at her in shock. _Don't worry?_ He doesn't know what she meant exactly, but it made him worry even more. _Maybe Ygritte was right. We should have called an ambulance...or the police_.

 

She let the curtain fall back. Then she began to unwrap the scarf, now bloodstained and crusted, from her arm. She examined the cut and made a face. "We're going to have to do something about this," she said. "Do you want to give me a hand?"

 

Jon was beginning to feel a little out of his depth. "I don't really know too much about first aid," he said.

 

"Well," she said, "you only have to hold the bandages and tie the ends where I can't reach. You do have bandages, don't you?"

 

Jon nodded. "Oh yes," he said. "In the first aid kit. In the bathroom. Under the sink."

 

And then he went into his bedroom and changed his clothes, wondering whether the mess on his shirt (his best shirt, bought for him by, oh God, Ygritte, she would have a fit) would ever come out.

 

The girl leaned over the sink, and he splashed warm water over her arm and shoulder. They cleaned out the cut - which was much less severe than Jon remembered it from the night before - and bandaged it up, and the girl did her very best not to wince in the process. Jon noticed how smooth her skin was, like fine silk. He just couldn't put it together - now, all cleaned up, she looked like royalty, like a princess from a fairytale. But when he found her she was a princess in clothes that looked like they were not washed in years, body covered in blood and dirt. 

 

"What's your name?" she asked.

 

"I'm Jon. Jon Snow," he answered and looked at the girl. Her eyes captivated him, he felt that feeling from last night when he found her. Her eyes like a magnet. "You?"

 

She was about to answer when the doorbell rang.

 

Jon looked at the mess in the bathroom, then at the girl, and wondered how it would look to an outside observer. Such as, for example... "Oh no," he said, realizing the worst. "I bet it's Ygritte. She's going to kill me."

 

"You wait here." he said as he left the bathroom.

 

 ***

 

 They wore black suits.

 

"Good morning to you, good sir," one of them said, "on this fine and beautiful day."

 

"Ah. Hello," Jon said.

 

"Can you give my partner and me a minute of your time?"

 

"Uhm," Jon mumbled, looking back into his apartment. "I'm busy at the moment."

 

The second of the visitors, a taller man than the other – who Jon thought looked like a snake - held stack of photocopies to his chest. He had said nothing until this moment - just waited, impassive.

 

"My name is Ramsay, and this gentleman here is Viserys." the shorter man said as he motioned towards the other.

 

"We're looking for my sister." the taller man finally spoke. His voice sent a shiver down Jon's spine. He sounded like a snake just as much as he looked like one.

 

Jon took an involuntary step backward.

 

"Can we come inside?" Ramsay asked.

 

"What do you want?" Jon asked while he grabbed the door firmly, preventing the two men to step inside. He already knew they were looking for the girl currently in his bathroom, and – for a reason that was unknown even to him –  he didn't want them to find her.

 

"She ran away," one of them explained, quietly. He thrust a photocopied sheet into Jon's hands. "She's a little...funny," he twirled one finger next to his temple in the universal gesture to indicate mental incapacity. "And dangerous." he added.

 

Jon looked down at the paper. It said:

 

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

 

Beneath that was a photocopy-gray photograph of a girl who looked to Jon like a cleaner version of the young lady he had left in his bathroom.

 

Under that it said:

 

ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF DAENERYS.

BITES AND KICKS. RUNAWAY.

TELL US IF YOU SAW HER.

WANT HER BACK. REWARD.

 

And below that, a telephone number. Jon looked back at the photograph. It was definitely the girl in his bathroom. "No," he said. "I haven't seen her, I'm afraid. I'm sorry."

 

The taller man, Viserys was his name if Jon remembered right, however, was not listening. Jon reached out to give him back his piece of paper, but the man simply pushed past him and walked into the apartment. Jon ran after him.

"What do you think you are doing? Will you stop that? Get out. I'll call the police. Look, you can't go in there—" The taller was headed straight for the bathroom. Jon hoped that the girl had had the presence of mind to lock the bathroom door. But no; it swung open at the man's push.

 

It was not a large bathroom. It contained a bathtub, a toilet, a sink, several bottles of shampoo, a bar of soap, and a towel. When Jon had left it, a couple of minutes before, it had also contained a girl, a bloody sink, and an open first aid kit. Now, it was gleamingly clean.

 

"Look I don't know who you are but get out of here," Jon warned them. "I don't have who you're looking for."

 

"Sorry, sir, for the inconvenience." one of them said. As fast as they came, they left the apartment, slamming the door behind them. Viserys slapped the handbill hard onto the wall, next to Jon's door. It stuck immediately and stuck hard.

 

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? it asked.

 

"Do you believe him?"

 

"No. She was here."

 

 ***

 

 Jon waited by his front door until he heard the main door slam, several floors below. He started to walk down the hall, back toward the bathroom. He opened the door and stepped inside. He looked around and found the place the same - clean, and without a girl in it. He shook his head in disbelief.

 

_Maybe I'm losing my mind. Or is this just a dream?_

 

And then he suddenly remembered. _Ygritte. I have to call Ygritte_.

 

Just as he started to walk down the hall, back toward the living room, the phone rang loudly, startling him.

 

"Hello?" Jon asked. "Hello?"

 

No sound came out of the receiver. Instead, there was a click, and Ygritte's voice came out of the answering machine on the table next to the phone.

 

"Jon? This is Ygritte. I'm sorry you're not there because this would have been our last conversation, and I did so want to tell you this to your face."

 

The phone, he realized, was completely dead. The receiver trailed a foot or so of cord and was then neatly cut off.

 

"You embarrassed me very deeply last night, Jon," the voice continued. "As far as I'm concerned our engagement is at an end. I have no intention of returning the ring, nor indeed of ever seeing you again. Bye."

 

The tape stopped turning, there was another click, and the little red light began to flash. Jon just stared at the phone in his hand then put it back to its place.

 

 And his heart almost stopped. Again. Because the girl was standing there. Again.

 

"Holy fu--" he said as he grabbed his chest. "How did you--? Where were you?" he asked in utter disbelief.

 

"Bad news?" asked the girl. She was standing just behind him, in the kitchen part of the apartment, with her arm neatly bandaged.

 

"How did you--? Where were you?" he asked.

 

"I, uh...I hid." she shrugged. "So, bad news?"

 

Jon would ask her more if he didn't already convince himself he lost his mind.

 

"Yes," he nodded instead. "Very bad." He walked over to her, handed her the HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? poster. "That's you, isn't it?"

 

She raised an eyebrow. "The photograph's me."

 

"And you are Daenerys?"

 

The silver-hair girl only nodded. "But Daenerys can be mouthful. Call me Dany." she smiled.

 

"Okay," Jon said as he looked at her. "Are you really dangerous?"

 

She only smiled, but weirdly, it didn't scare Jon.

 

"Was he really your brother?" he asked.

 

"He was," she said while she was looking at nothing in front of her, seemingly deep in thought, "But not anymore."

 

Jon nodded and tried to pretend that everything was normal.

 

 "So where were you?" he asked. "Just now?"

 

"I was here." she said.

 

Jon was feeling utterly out of his league by now."Look, if it isn't a personal question, what happened to you?"

 

Daenerys only sighed. "You don't want to know," she said, simply.

 

"Oh, well, I'm sorry if I—"

 

"No. Jon. Honestly, you don't want to know. It wouldn't do you any good. You've done more than you should have already."

 

"Well. I mean. I couldn't just... leave you there."

 

"You could have," she said. "But you didn't." She pressed herself up against the wall and peered out of the window. Jon walked over to the window and looked out.

 

Across the street, Ramsay and Viserys were coming out of the bakery, and HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? was stuck in a place of prominence in its window.

 

"Look, with those two still around we have to get a message to..." She paused. "To someone who can help."

 

"And you should come with me," she added. "For now, you should stay with me. For your own safety."

 

 ***

 

 It took a little convincing, but Jon agreed to accompany her for the next few hours. She said it's necessary until she leaves, to keep him safe from Viserys and Ramsay.

 

It was late afternoon in Central London, and, with autumn drawing on, it was getting dark. They had taken the Tube to Tottenham Court Road and was now walking west down Oxford Street.

 

"Where are we going?" Jon asked, speaking for the first time since they left his apartment.

 

"To a..." she paused. "Well, I guess I could say a friend of mine. He owns my father a favour."

 

Jon kept talking. " Before, when they came to my apartment. Where were you?"

 

She looked around for traffic before they crossed the street. "I was there."

 

"But—" He stopped talking, out of words. There wasn't anywhere in the apartment that she could have hidden. But she hadn't left the apartment.

 

They turned into Hanway Street. Although they had taken only a few steps from the well-lit bustle of Oxford Street, they might as well have been in another city: Hanway Street was empty, forsaken; a narrow, dark road, little more than an alleyway, filled with gloomy record shops and closed restaurants, the only light spilling out from the secretive drinking clubs on the upper floors of buildings.

 

As far as Jon could remember, Hanway Place was a dead end. But Daenerys didn't seem to care. She went ahead, with Jon following her.

 

Then she stopped in front of the wall that signalled the end of the – as Jon thought correctly – blind alley.

 

She looked up then, just above their heads. Jon followed her gaze and saw a little carving in one of the bricks.

 

It was barely visible, if you didn't know what to look for, one would probably never notice it.

 

It looked like a dragon, but not like in the books or movies.

 

It had three heads.

 

Daenerys reached for it with her uninjured arm and brushed it slightly with the top of her fingers. Jon heard her exhale loudly as he watched her movements closely.

 

"We're here," she said, "Close your eyes."

 

Jon furrowed his brows and looked at her in question. She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed it gently. "Trust me."

 

 _Trust you?_ he thought. _How could I trust you after all that happened?_

 

And still, he found himself nodding, and he closed his eyes. It took only a few seconds when he heard her speak again.

 

"Alright, it's done."

 

He opened his eyes and looked around. Nothing changed, nothing at all.

 

"So, what's now?"

 

"Now, we wait." Daenerys sighed.

 

"Wait for what?" they heard a man's voice from behind them.

 

Jon turned to the direction the voice came and saw a man leaning against the wall with his arms folded against his chest. He looked at Daenerys then, who was also looking at the man.

 

"Jaime."

 

 ***

 

 The man went down on one knee to the girl and lowered his head.

 

"My lady," he said.

 

She seemed uncomfortable. "Oh, do get up, Jaime. I'm pleased you came."

 

"You called, I came," Jaime said then looked at Jon. "You are Jon Snow, the young man who rescued our wounded Daenerys."

 

Jon looked at him with wide eyes. "Uhm, well, yes, I am."

 

"Her family had remarkable recuperative powers. It's a wonder anyone managed to kill them at all, isn't it?" The man who called himself Jaime walked restlessly up and down the alley. Jon could already tell that he was the type of person who was always in motion.

 

"Someone killed your family?" Jon looked at Daenerys then, but she avoided his eyes. The look on her face was enough of an answer, and Jon's heart clenched at the sight.  He noticed the tears that started to form in her eyes but before he could say anything, she started to speak.

 

"You know why I'm here, Ser Jaime." she said.

 

"You want my help," Jaime simply said. "But what do I get in return?"

 

Daenerys was silent for a few moments then looked into Jaime, her face held a serious expression. "Your debt will be paid."

 

His eyes flashed. Jaime grinned to himself, like a hungry panther sighting a lost peasant child.

 

"Deal." he said.

 

"Deal." Daenerys answered and shook the hand he offered.

 

With a sigh, she turned to Jon then and her eyes found his.

 

"You're leaving?" Jon asked, not sure how to feel about the whole situation.

 

She nodded. "I'll be safe now. More or less. I hope. For a little while."

 

"Where are you going now?"

 

She smiled gently and shook her head. "Uh-uh. I'm out of your life. And you've been wonderful." She went up on tiptoes then and kissed him on the cheek.

 

"If I ever need to get in touch with you—?"

 

"You don't. Ever. You will forget me. And..." and then she paused. "Look, I'm sorry, okay?"

 

Jon inspected his feet, in an awkward sort of way. "There's nothing to be sorry about," he said, and added, doubtfully, "it was fun."

 

Then he looked up again.

 

But there was nobody there.

 

 ***

 

  _NOTE_

_Hope you liked it! For those who asked: yes, I will follow the book's storyline. I will mix it up, write my own ideas into it - I will change some characters, motives, side storylines and locations - but the main storyline will be almost the same._

_The only reviews I can get are Kudos and Comments, so please, if you read it, even if just a few words, tell me what you think. Your review is the thing that keeps me going._

_I will update next weekend, probably twice! :)_

_See you all soon! xo_


	4. Invisible

"You'll forget me."

 

Jon laid in his bed, unable to fall asleep. He played the day over and over again in his head, trying to find a realistic and believable answer to the million questions in his mind.

 

Not even 48 hours ago, he was walking on the street with his fiancée. He expected to have a nice dinner with her and her boss, then go home – Ygritte's home – and fall asleep with Ygritte next to him. But then that silver-haired girl appeared out of nowhere, like a hurricane and turned his life on its head.

 

Now – because he did what he did – Ygritte broke their engagement.

 

Ever since Jon started his relationship with Ygritte, he knew she was a materialistic girl, to an outsider, she might even appear cold and emotionless. Like Sam always said - she's terrifying. And yet, Jon accepted Ygritte for who she was and learned to love her for it. What he couldn't accept is the cold-hearted woman he got to look at last night when they found Daenerys laying there at their feet, covered in blood. 

 

Daenerys. 

 

Where the hell did she come from?

 

Jon was sure he saw a door opening ahead of them, then Daenerys stepped out before she collapsed on the sidewalk. But when he looked up again a few moments later... there was only the wall. No door, not even a window. Nothing.

 

And then, again, when those two creepy guys in black suits - Viserys and Ramsay if he remembers correctly - came to his apartment looking for her, she just simply disappeared. She claimed she was there, but Jon wasn't convinced about that. He lived in that apartment for three years now, he knows she couldn't hide anywhere in that tiny bathroom.

 

Then the whole 'you better not to look for me, Jon' thing. If he's being honest, it irked his mind a little. There was something, she was in something he couldn't understand. That weird guy in the alley...

 

Suddenly getting an idea, Jon got up from the bed and went to his bathroom. There has to be something, somewhere, that tells him how she disappeared when the two guys came in uninvited. He stepped into his bathtub and searched with his fingers and eyes for anything unusual.

 

But there was nothing.

 

He opened the little cabinet beneath the sink and examined it. Even though Daenerys was pretty small, there was no way she could have climbed in there. Jon closed its doors and laid his hands on the sink. He sighed in defeat and accepted that he would probably never have his answers. He looked up, into the mirror. It was the middle of the night and he knew tomorrow will be a very long day. He intends to speak with Ygritte, will try to explain himself to her, and to ask what else he should have done. Because of her cold behaviour last night, he fears he won't like her answer.

 

When he noticed the dark circles under his eyes, he decided it was really time to get at least a few hours of sleep. Without silver-haired girls and wolfs and creepy guys invading his dreams...

 

...that's when he noticed it in the mirror. He turned around and went to the other side of the bathroom, with two quick steps.

 

Just like the one on that wall.

 

_It was barely visible, if you didn't know what to look for, one would probably never notice it._

 

But Jon looked for it and found it. He brushed his fingertips against the wall, feeling the little carving beneath his touch.

 

A dragon with three heads.

 

He thought if he finds something here, he would be alright with everything that happened. That it would clear the clouds in his mind, but if anything, that little symbol made him just more confused. It was definitely not there before, he would have seen it, because it was in the middle of the wall, just above his head.

 

What the hell is that?

 

He knew he should have asked Daenerys when they were out there, but something tells him he wouldn't have got an answer to that. He's not sure if it's because she wanted to keep him safe, or because she didn't trust him, or... well, that guy did tell him she was dangerous. He dropped his hand down and shook his head, he knew no matter how hard he tries, he won't get answers right there in his bathroom. And maybe he shouldn't have them, not ever, he should probably continue with his life and forget that crazy day once and for all. He walked back to his bedroom and laid down again, deciding it was really, really time to fall asleep.

 

"You'll forget me." a little voice repeated again and again in his mind. He groaned and moved to his other side, then put his face into a pillow.

 

But before his dreams invaded his mind, he knew his last thought has something to do with everything:

 

_"It will start with doors."_

 

***

 

On Monday morning, Jon took an old telephone he had been given for Christmas several years ago by his aunt out of the drawer at the bottom of the closet and plugged it into the wall. He tried to call Ygritte, but without success. She probably spent the night at her parent's house. Instead of trying again, he decided to get ready for the day ahead. He will meet with her later.

 

Jon found Ygritte's parents deeply intimidating, each in their separate ways. Neither of them had entirely approved of him as a future son-in-law: in fact, her mother had, on one occasion, mentioned to him quite casually how disappointed they were by Jon and Ygritte's engagement and her conviction that Ygritte could if she wanted to, do so much better.

 

Jon's own parents were both dead already. Well, probably. His mother passed away a few years back in a heart attack, it was so sudden, and Jon dealt with it really hard. As for his father, Jon never knew him, so he might as well be dead, for all it mattered to him. His mother never really spoke about him, and after learning no matter how often he asks she won't tell who’s he, or what he’s like, he simply stopped asking. Even if he was alive somewhere…he never reached out to Jon. It was hard, growing up without a father, but his mother gave him all the love he needed.

 

Jon sat on his couch, brooding. The events of the previous two days somehow seemed less and less real. What was real, though, was the message that Ygritte had left, telling him she did not want to see him again. He played it, and replayed it, that Sunday, hoping each time that she would relent, that he'd hear the warmth in her voice. He never did.

 

 While brushing his teeth, he couldn't help but stare at the carving on the wall behind him through the mirror. When he finished he shook his head and groaned, then got dressed and left the apartment in a hurry.

 

He thought about going out and buying a Monday paper but decided against it. Mr. Mance –THE MR. MANCE, as Sam said it –, Ygritte's boss, conquered all the papers, he was there everywhere. His own papers talked about him, and so did the rest. Buying one would, Jon suspected, just remind him of the dinner he had failed to attend on Friday night.

 

He came out onto the street at a run at ten to nine, swinging his briefcase, staring up and down the road like a madman, praying for a taxi. Then he sighed with relief because a big black car was heading down the road toward him, its yellow "taxi" sign bright. He waved at it and yelled. The taxi gently slid past him, ignoring him completely; it turned at a corner and was gone.

 

Another taxi. Another yellow light that meant the taxi was available. This time Jon stepped out into the middle of the road to flag it down. It swerved past him and continued on its way. Jon began to swear under his breath. Then he ran for the nearest Tube station.

 

He pulled out a pocketful of coins, hit the button of the ticket machine for a single ticket to Charing Cross, and thumbed his change into the slot. Every coin he put in went straight through the guts of the machine and clattered into the tray at the bottom. No ticket appeared. He tried another ticket machine, with the same lack of result. And another. The ticket seller in the office was speaking to someone on the telephone when Jon went over to complain and to buy his ticket manually. But despite Jon's yells of "Excuse me" and "Hey" the ticket seller continued on without even looking up at him.

 

"Fuck it!" Jon thought, and he vaulted the barrier. No one stopped him; no one seemed to care. He ran, breathless and sweating, down the escalator, and made it onto the crowded platform just as a train came in.

 

***

 

"I'm sorry I'm late," Jon said, to no one actually, in the crowded office.

 

The clock on the office wall said that it was 9:30. He dropped his briefcase on his chair, wiped the sweat from his face with his handkerchief. He looked down at his desktop. There was something missing. Or, more precisely, there was everything missing. "Where are my things?" he asked the room, a little more loudly. "Where is my laptop? Where are my wolves?"

 

He checked the desk drawers. They were empty too.

 

Then he walked through the office until he got to Sam's workstation.

 

"Sam. What's going on? Is this a joke or something?"

 

Sam looked around as if he had heard something. He flicked the keyboard, activating a screen-saver, then he shook his head as if to clear it, picked up the telephone, and began to dial.

 

"Look, this isn't funny. I don't know what everyone's playing."

 

Finally, to his enormous relief, Sam looked up at him.

 

"If I've been fired then just tell me I've been fired, but all this pretending I'm not here..."

 

"Hi. Yeah. I'm Sam. Can I help you?" Sam asked, then looked down at his phone again.

 

"What are you talking about, Sam, it’s me." Jon pleaded. Sam continued to look at the phone in his hand, not minding Jon the slightest.

 

"Sam!" Jon said louder this time.

 

"Hi." Sam smiled as he looked up again. "My name is Sam, can I help you?"

 

"I don't think so," Jon said coldly, and he walked out of the office, leaving his briefcase behind him.

 

***

 

Jon knew Ygritte worked not far from the building he works...or just worked?

 

It had to be some kind of a prank. Sam was just messing around, everything's going to be normal again once he speaks to Ygritte.

 

He jogged up that road. He got to the Mance building in ten minutes, walked straight past the uniformed security guards on the ground floor, stepped into the elevator, and went up. The inside of the elevator was mirrored, and he stared at himself as he went up. God, he looked awful. There was a fluting tone, and the elevator door opened.

 

There was a receptionist by the elevator, she was reading Cosmopolitan. She did not look up as Jon came over.

 

"Hello, Miss."

 

The receptionist ignored him, intent upon examining her nails.

 

"Hello, Miss." Jon said again in a more urgent tone. "Hello, I'm looking for Ygritte."

 

She finally noticed him and looked up from her desk, straight at him. The receptionist just stared at him a few moments with a weird expression - confusion? Disinterest? Then she shook her head and continued to look at her nails.

 

Jon decided he had enough and walked straight into Ygritte's office. He opened the door and went in. She was standing in front of three large posters, each advertising "Angels over England—A Travelling Exhibition" each with a different image of an angel on it. She turned as he came in, and she smiled warmly at him.

 

"Ygritte. Thank God. Listen, I think I'm going mad or something. It started when I couldn't get a taxi this morning, and then the office and the Tube and—it's like I've become some kind of non-person."

 

She smiled at him again.

 

"Look," Jon started. "I'm sorry about the other night. Well, not about what I did, but about upsetting you, and... Look, I'm sorry, really, and it's all crazy.

 

Ygritte nodded and continued to smile sympathetically.

 

"You're going to think I'm absolutely awful, but I have a really dreadful memory for faces. Give me a second, and I know I'll get it."

 

And at that point, Jon knew that it was real, and a heavy dread settled in the pit of his stomach. Whatever madness was happening that day was really happening. It was no joke, no trick or prank. "It's okay," he said, dully. "Forget it."

 

And he walked away, out the door and down the corridor.

 

***

 

Jon walked back to his flat, upset and confused and angry. Sometimes he would wave at taxis, but never with any real hope that they would stop, and none of them did. His feet hurt, and his eyes stung, and he knew that soon enough he would wake up from today and a proper Monday, a sensible Monday, a decent, honest Monday would begin.

 

When he reached the apartment, he filled the bathtub with hot water, abandoned his clothes on the bed, and, naked, walked through the hall and climbed into the relaxing waters.

 

What is he going to do if when tomorrow comes and nobody will recognize him? Is this how his life going to be from now on?

 

"I’m so, so sorry." he remembered Daenerys’s last words before she and that weird man vanished. Did she know what’s going to happen to him? Is that why she said she’s sorry? In that case…she knows something, and she has to know how to reverse it. How to get his life back to normal, to the way it was before he met her.

 

Another person would have already regretted that he helped her. Someone else would have already cursed the day he met her. But Jon couldn’t find it in himself. No matter what happens next, he would lie to himself if he said he would do it differently if he was given another chance. No, he would help her again without giving it a second thought, even though he’s not sure why. His mother always taught him to ’help where you can’… but there was just something about the silver-haired girl that captivated him. She was a walking-talking mystery, almost waiting for him to solve.

 

He dozed off to these thoughts as the warm water soothed his body.

 

_"Come on boy, we have to hurry." he heard her say. "We have to make it to the Market to meet with her."_

_She was taller than him, weirdly, he was looking up at her from knee-high. Jon immediately realized it's a dream again._

_He felt the ground beneath his paws again, he felt the wind tickling his fur. He looked around, trying to figure out where he was, and when he did, it was to his utter surprise._

_It was... Paris. They were walking on the streets of Paris, him and his human companion. It was definitely a girl, given the voice, and she sniffed the air, it was the same person from his previous dreams._

_But how was he able to control these dreams? When you dream, everything just kinda happens, but in his wolf dreams, he can always feel the air, the scents, the way how someone pets him on the head and the way it feels to run as a wolf._

_"Come on...we have a long journey ahead." the girl said again._

_Jon tried to make out her features. The more dreams like this he had the more clear it became. She had brown shoulder-length hair and brown eyes. She was dressed almost like a boy, like a pirate, with a leather vest, black boots and knives on her everywhere. Like literally, everywhere. One on each of her sides, one in her shoes at her ankle and one in her hands._

_"We have to get to the Market in time to catch up with the Princess." she said. "Sorry, but no time for hunting, boy."_

_The Princess? Daenerys?_

 

He jerked up from his dream breathing heavily when he heard noises coming from the direction of the front door. Those dreams will give him a heart attack one day.

 

He put a towel around his lower half and walked out of the bathroom.

 

But before he could reach the door, he stopped in his tracks. It was wide open.

 

"Hello, Mr. Snow." Jon heard someone say. He turned around and his stomach dropped. It was them.

 

"You had a troubling day, didn't you?" Viserys asked.

 

Jon couldn't really find the words.

 

"What the hell are you doing in here? How did you get in?"

 

Ramsay made his way closer to Jon, who, at the same time, stepped back instinctively. "Our lock picking skills should not be your biggest concern right now." the man said with a devilish smile on his face.

 

"Listen, this time, we're only here to warn you." the other said.

 

As Jon looked at him now, he could easily see the resemblance between him and Daenerys. Silver hair, purple eyes. But while Daenerys's eyes held something warm and kind, his eyes looked cold and evil.

 

"We asked if you saw my sister or not, and you said you didn't." he continued.

 

"Correct us, if we're wrong, but we have reason to believe that you were embroidering the truth more than perhaps a little." Ramsay finished.

 

"She's not here anymore. And I don't know where she is."

 

"We know that."

 

"And if I were you, Mr. Snow, I would no longer worry about her. Her days are numbered, and the number in question isn't even in the double digits."

 

"I'm calling the police. You can't just break in here like this."

 

"You can call anyone you wish. But I'd hate you to think we were making a threat. Neither myself nor Viserys is making any threats."

 

"No? Then what the hell are you doing?"

 

"We're making a promise," Viserys said through the static and the echo and the hiss. _Just like a snake_. "And we do know where you live."

 

With that, they turned around and left the apartment, leaving a baffled Jon behind.

 

Eventually, and after some deliberation, he took the black sports bag from under the bed and put socks into it. Underpants. Some T-shirts. His passport. His wallet. He was wearing jeans, sneakers, a thick sweater. He remembered the way the girl who called herself Daenerys had said goodbye. The way she had paused, the way she had said she was sorry and he was now surer than ever.

 

"You knew," he said to the empty apartment. "You knew this would happen." He went into the kitchen, took some fruit from the bowl, put that into the bag. Then he zipped it up and walked out onto the darkened street.

 

***

 

_NOTES_

_Hi guys! Hope you liked it, tell me what you think! :)_

_I’ll update again very soon, probably around Monday! See you soon! xo_


	5. Home

There was still an hour until dawn, but the sky was beginning to lighten, turning a stark, leaden color. Strands of mist hung like livid ghosts in the air.

 

"We have to hurry." Jaime said.

 

"You insisted to make that bypass to Davos." Daenerys turned to him. "Why were we there again? What was in that box you gave to him?" she asked.

 

"It doesn’t matter," Jaime shrugged. "This is it?" he asked as he examined the door in front of them. It was roughly boarded up and covered with stained posters of forgotten bands and long-closed nightclubs.

 

"So this is the entrance?" he asked.

 

Daenerys nodded while she brushed her hand on the surface of the door, touching the three-headed dragon sigil "One of them." She said with a sigh.

 

"You should not leave those marks behind. It's not safe."

 

"It's not my choice. If I open a door somewhere, it will appear."

 

Jaime folded his arms. "Well? Say 'Open' or whatever it is that you do."

 

"I don't want to do this," she said. "I'm really not sure that we're doing the right thing."

 

"You can't back away now," Jaime said. It was clear to Daenerys that he was a starting to get annoyed as she looked at him. But she knew it was only a job for him, and he does it only for his own benefits.

 

"I know you're scared to go back. But we're here now, and if you wanna find out what happened to your family," he said while pointing at the door. "Then you know this is the only way."

 

"Stop acting like you care," Daenerys answered. "You're only helping me because of your guilt."

 

"Very well," he unfolded his arms. "I'll see you, then." He turned on his heel and began to walk back the way they had come. Daenerys seized his arm.

 

"Wait!" she said. "Sorry...But would you leave me here? Just like that?"

 

He grinned, without humor. "Certainly. I'm a very busy man. Things to see. People to deal with."

 

"Alright, just hold on," she said as she let go of his arm. She turned back toward the door and took a deep breath. "Just give me a minute." She bit her lower lip. "The last time I was here..." she trailed off.

 

"The last time you were here, you found your family dead, I know," he started. "Remeber, I was there too..."

 

"No, you weren't" Daenerys snapped at him, then looked away again, back to the door. "You were supposed to, but you weren't."

 

"And that's why I'm here now," Jaime said while he grabbed Daenerys's shoulder to make her look at him. "I wanna right my wrongs by helping you. But to do that, I also need your help along the way."

 

"I know. It's just..."

 

“You don't have to explain it anymore. If we aren't going in, then our business relationship is at an end."

 

She looked up at him "And that's all?"

 

"I could wish you the best of luck in your coming days, but I'm afraid you wouldn’t live long enough."

 

"You're a piece of work, aren't you?"

 

He said nothing. "Well," she said. "Come on then. I'll take us in." She put her left hand on the boarded-up door, and with her right hand, she took Jaime's huge hand. Her tiny fingers entwined with his larger ones.

 

She closed her eyes.

 

Something whispered and shivered and changed...and they were not outside anymore.

 

***

 

Viserys and Ramsay had set up their home in an old theater, closed down ten years ago because of budget cutbacks. The property developers, who had announced their intention of turning it into a unique luxury shopping center, had started to disappear as soon as the theater had been closed, and so it stood there, year after year, gray and empty and unwanted, its windows boarded up, its doors padlocked shut.

 

Behind the stage, there's an abandoned hall, filled with broken glass. If you walk past the staff toilets and dressing rooms where the ceiling had collapsed entirely, leaving it open to the stairwell above, you can reach a small, rusting iron staircase, from which the once-white paint was peeling off in long, damp strips. And if you went up the staircase, and pushed your way through a half-decayed wooden door, you would find yourself in the loft, above the main stage. Ramsay and Viserys made that loft into their home - at least for a while.

 

Viserys was playing with knives he had found in a corner. A whole box of knives, carefully wrapped in wax paper, and he had been trying to think of things to do with them.

 

"If I might have your attention, Ramsay," he said, at length. "Look at this."

 

Ramsay laid on his bed, resting his head on his arms. He looked up curiously when he heard Viserys speak.

 

Viserys pointed to the wall at the opposite wall of the room. Several portraits decorated the walls, probably actors who worked there before, in the theater. Viserys took five knives into his right hand, took careful aim, and threw them at the wall. Each blade stuck into a picture, all five landing between the eyes of the faces. It was like a top knife-thrower's act.

 

Ramsay shook his head in appreciation then took some knives into his hands and motioned for Visery to stand against the wall. He smiled and turned to face him when he reached the wall.

 

"What's so clever about that?" Ramsay asked. "You didn't hit a living target."

 

Viserys sighed. "I didn't?" he said. "Well, how could I have been such a ninny?"

 

"Why don't you show me how it should have been done?"

 

Ramsay smiled mischievously and nodded. He raised his right arm: his knife, wicked and sharp and perfectly weighted, was in his right hand. He narrowed his eyes, and he threw. The knife flew through the air and thudded into the damp plaster wall - but only through Viserys's left hand, which was spread with his palm against the wall.

 

Ramsay looked at Viserys, satisfied, his hand still pinned to the wall. "That's how it's done," he said.

 

"I'll keep it in mind." Viserys grinned. He took the knife and pulled it out with his other hand. He shook his left hand and flexed the fingers, then wiped the fragments of damp plaster from the knife. He looked down at his left hand and was pleased the cut had already started to fade away.

 

A telephone began to ring.

 

Ramsay picked it up. "Ramsay and Viserys," he said, smoothly, "How may we be in your service?"

 

The person at the other end of the phone said something. Ramsay cringed.  "Oh. Yes, sir. Yes, indeed. And might I say how your call brightens up and cheers our otherwise dreary and uneventful day?" Another pause. "Of course I'll stop toadying. Delighted to. An honor, and—what do we know? We know that—" An interruption.

 

"No, we don't know where she is at this precise moment. But we don't have to. She'll be at the market—" His mouth tightened, and, "We have no intention of violating their market truce. More of waiting till she has left the market and scrobbling her..." He was silent then, and listened, nodding from time to time.

 

"Yes, she was there at his place."

 

"No, yes, we have dealt with him, he will no longer be a problem."

 

"I don't know how he saw her given he's from Above."

 

"That might be arranged, yes," he said, into the phone. "I mean it will be arranged. Of course. Yes. I realize that. And, sir, perhaps we could talk about—" But the caller had hung up. Ramsay stared at the phone for a moment, then put it down. "You think you're so damned clever," he whispered.

 

"Who was that?" Viserys asked him.

 

"Our employer," Ramsay answered. "It's certain now. It has to be your sister, Daenerys, there's no one else."

 

"So we aren't allowed to kill her anymore?" Viserys asked bewildered.

 

"That would be about the short and the long of it, yes."

 

Viserys took a knife in his hand and threw it in his anger. He sighed and curled his fists. "I'm utterly disappointed."

 

"Don't worry, I'm sure your time will come," Ramsay said. "Now, it seems that the Little Princess has announced that she shall be hiring a bodyguard. At the market. Tomorrow."

 

"So?" Viserys looked at the back of his hand, where the knife had gone in and on the palm of his hand, where the knife had come out. He rubbed it with a massive thumb. The flesh closed, knitted, was whole again.

 

"Maybe we should get one too?" he snickered.

 

"We don't need a bodyguard, Ramsay. We hurt people. We don't get hurt."

 

Ramsay turned off the lights. "Oh, Viserys," he said, enjoying the sound of the words, as he enjoyed the sound of all words, "if you cut us, do we not bleed?"

 

Viserys pondered this for a moment, in the dark. Then he said, with perfect accuracy, "No."

 

***

 

The memory was fresh, only a few days old - Daenerys moved across the House With the Red Door calling "I'm home," and "Hello?" She slipped from the anteroom to the dining room, to the library, to the drawing room. No one answered. She moved to another room.

 

The House With the Red Door was her childhood home growing up. It was unique and only theirs - it had only one door, the main one.

 

There was an inside swimming pool. Her father had found it when he was younger, abandoned and about to be demolished, and he had woven it into the fabric of the House. Perhaps in the world outside, in London Above, the room had long been destroyed and forgotten. Daenerys had no idea where any of the rooms of her house were, physically. Her grandfather had constructed the house, taking a room from here, a room from there, all through London, discrete and doorless; her father had added to it.

 

She walked along the side of the old swimming pool, pleased to be home, puzzled by the absence of her family. And then she looked down.

 

There was someone floating in the water, trailing a cloud of blood behind him from his throat. It was her brother, Rhaegar. His eyes were open wide and sightless.

 

"That hurt," Jaime said as he rubbed his head then neck as if trying to ease a sudden pain. "You could have warned me."

 

Dany looked at him. "Sorry," she smiled apologetically. "You'll get used to it."

 

They were in a huge white room. Every wall was covered with pictures. Each picture was of a different room. The white room contained no doors - no openings of any kind.

 

"This is the entrance hall. We can go from here to any room in the House. They are all linked."

 

"You've been here before, haven't you?" Daenerys asked with her brows furrowed.

 

Jaime shook his head. "I was only protecting your father when he left his home."

 

Before Daenerys could say something, Jaime looked away and spoke. "Where are the other rooms located?"

 

She shook her head. "I don't know. Miles away, probably. They're scattered all over the Underside."

 

"Quite remarkable. An associative house, every room of which is located somewhere else. So imaginative." Jaime said as he walked around, looking at the pictures. "Your grandfather was a man of vision, Daenerys."

 

"I never knew him." She swallowed, then continued, talking to herself as much as to him. "We should have been safe here. Nobody should have been able to hurt us. Only my family could move around it."

 

"Let's hope your father's journal gives us some clues," he said. "Where do we start looking?" Daenerys shrugged. "You're certain he kept a journal?" he pressed.

 

She nodded. "He used to go into his study, and private the links until he'd finished dictating."

 

"We'll start in the study, then."

 

"But I looked there. I did. When I was cleaning up the body..." she didn't finish as tears were threatening to fall.

 

"There. There," Jaime said, awkwardly patting her shoulder. And he added, for good measure, "There." He did not comfort well.

 

"I just... can you give me a second?" Daenerys took a deep breath then exhaled loudly. "I'll be fine."

 

He nodded and walked to the far end of the room. When he looked back she was still standing there, on her own, silhouetted in the white entrance chamber filled with pictures of rooms, and she was hugging herself and shuddering.

 

***

 

"I'm sorry," Daenerys said, hesitantly. Her eyes were red and puffy. "I'm fine now, we can go."

 

"Are you?"

 

She bit her lower lip. "No. Not really. I've been running and hiding and running so hard that...this was the first chance I've really had to..." she stopped.

 

Jaime nodded.

 

"After you," he said. He followed her back to the wall of pictures. She put one hand on the painting of her father's study and took Jaime's large hand with the other.

 

A second later, they were in her father's study.

 

After a few moments of shaking the pain away, Jaime took in the room, eyes sliding from detail to detail. The leather-bound books, an astrolabe, convex and concave mirrors, odd scientific instruments; there were maps on the walls, of lands and cities Jaime had never heard of; a desk, covered in handwritten correspondence...and a huge stuffed dragon hanging from the ceiling.

 

"What do you think it was like?" he asked as he looked up at the dragon. "All those centuries ago people looked up to the sky and saw them flying around. It must have been incredible, especially to your family," he said. "They rode them."

 

"Yeah, it must have been incredible." Daenerys answered with a smile.

 

"So not even your family knew what happened to them? They couldn't just vanish from one day to another."

 

"Sadly, they did," Daenerys sighed and snapped her fingers. "Just like that."

 

The white wall behind the desk was marred by a reddish-brown stain. There was a small portrait of the Targaryen family on the desk. Jaime stared at it. "Your parents and your brother... all of them dead. How did you escape?" he asked.

 

She walked over to him and took the picture from his hand. "I was lucky. I'd gone off exploring for a few days...then I came back and found them."

 

"And your brother did all this, to his own family," Jaime said. "And he's trying to kill you now."

 

Daenerys sighed and put the picture back on the table. "He hated us because he didn't possess our abilities and he grew jealous," she started. "We loved him all the same, but it wasn't enough for him."

 

She swallowed, her violet eyes brimming with tears.

 

"Pull yourself together," Jaime said, shortly. "We need your father's journal. We have to find out who did this."

 

"We know who did this. It was Viserys and that Ramsay." Dany snapped. "They killed them in cold blood."

 

"Yes," Jaime nodded. He opened a hand, waggled his fingers as he spoke. "They're arms. Hands. Fingers. There's a head that ordered it, that wants you dead, too."

 

"Your brother might have done it out of jealousy, but Ramsay…he didn’t help him just because Viserys asked him nicely. There’s a reason behind his involvement." Jaime added.

 

Daenerys considered what he said. She knows it is true, even if her brother became mad over the years, and hated their family, she knows there’s a bigger picture. Someone wanted to wipe out the Targaryen family and used Viserys’s hate as a tool to do it.

 

"It's not here," she said. "I told you. I looked."

 

"I was under the misapprehension that your family was skilled in locating doors, both obvious and otherwise."

 

She glowered at him. Then she closed her eyes and put her finger and thumb on each side of the bridge of her nose.

 

Meanwhile, Jaime examined the objects on Aerys's desk. An inkwell; a chess-piece; a bone die; a gold pocket-watch; several quill-feathers and…

 

_Interesting._

 

It was a small statue of a dragon. It was the size of a large chess-piece, and it had been roughly carved out of black obsidian. He picked it up casually, turned it over, curled his fingers around it.

 

Daenerys lowered her hand from her face. She looked puzzled and confused. "What's the matter?" he asked.

 

"It is here." she said, simply. She began to walk through the study, turning her head first to one side and then to the other. "It has to be." Jaime slipped the carving discreetly into an inside pocket.

 

"Did your father ever told you about it?"

 

"He said that if anything happens I will find answers in it, but never told where to look for it." Daenerys sighed as she looked at the shelves. "He said ‘you will always find it in the history of our family.’ "

 

"Hmm—" Jaime sighed as he put a finger under his chin, trying to figure out where the journal could be. "Maybe it’s not just your family, but as the House of the Targaryens. It has to be somewhere near the table."

 

Daenerys realized then and quickly jumped on her father’s table. "There," she said. She reached out and took the stuffed dragons' head in her hands. As she looked at its black eyes she noticed one of it was slightly different, shinier than the other one. She removed it from the dragon’s head, it was roughly the size and shape of a small cannon-ball.

 

"This is it?" Jaime asked.

 

She nodded. "It’s dragonglass."

 

"Well done."

 

She looked grave. "I don't know how I could have missed it before."

 

"You were upset," Jaime said. "I was certain it would be here. And I am so rarely wrong. Now..." he held the little black globe up. The light caught the polished glass and glinted from the brass and copper fittings. It galled him to admit ignorance about anything, but he said it anyway. "How does this work?"

 

***

 

The deep tunnels had been dug in the 1920’s, for a high-speed extension to the Northern Line of London's Underground Railway system. During the Second World War, troops had been quartered there in the thousands, their waste pumped up by compressed air to the level of the sewers far above. Both sides of the runnels had been lined with metal bunk beds for the troops to sleep on. When the war ended the bunk beds had stayed, and on their wire bases cardboard boxes were stored, each box filled with letters and files and papers: secrets, of the dullest kind, stored down deep, to be forgotten. The need for economy had closed the deep tunnels completely in the early 1990’s. The boxes of secrets were removed, to be scanned and stored on computers, or shredded, or burned.

 

Gregor made his home in the deepest of the deep tunnels, far beneath Camden Town Tube. He had piled abandoned metal bunk beds in front of the only entrance.

 

He slept on a pile of rags, snoring and snuffling, with the hilt of a homemade two-bladed sword on the ground beside his hand.

 

A hand turned up the oil lamp.

 

Gregor had the two-bladed sword in his hand, and he was on his feet almost before his eyes were open. He blinked, stared around him.

 

"You're called the Mountain, right?" Ramsay asked, stepping into the light.

 

Gregor took a step back: a mistake. There was a knife at his temple, the point of the blade next to his eye.

 

"I wouldn't do that." Viserys said from behind him

 

"Do you know who we are?"

 

Gregor did the nearest thing he could to a nod that didn't actually involve moving any muscles. He knew who Ramsay and Viserys were.

 

"There is talk that a certain young lady will be auditioning bodyguards at the Market tomorrow. Had you thought of trying out for the task?"

 

Gregor started to struggle and reached for a knife. As an answer, he received a hit at the back of his head.

 

"Do that again and I'll carve out your eye." Viserys snarled.

 

"We want you to get yourself to the market. We want you to participate in the audition. We want you to do whatever you have to, to become that certain young lady's personal bodyguard. Then, when you get the job, one thing you don't forget. You may protect her from everyone else, but when we want her, we take her. Got it?"

 

Gregor ran his tongue over the wreck of his teeth. "Are you bribing me?" he asked.

 

"No," Viserys answered. "We're threatening you."

 

"And if you don't do what we say, we'll...hurt you...very badly... before we... kill you."

 

"Ah," Gregor said. "Then I'm working for you, aren't I?"

 

"Yes, you are," Ramsay said. "Welcome aboard."

 

***

 

"Look." Daenerys said. She placed the ball on a platform.

 

Lights shone through the machine and into the ball. It began to spin around and around, then a patrician face appeared on the small screen, vividly colored.

 

Slightly out of time, a voice came from the horn, crackling mid-speech. "...that two cities should be so near," said the voice, "and yet in all things so far. People live above us but aren't able to see us. This should change. We could live in peace together, learn from one another."

 

Daenerys stared at the screen, her face unreadable.

 

Aerys coughed. "I am not alone in this belief. There are those who wish to see things the way they are. There are others who want the situation to worsen. There are those..."

 

"Can you speed it up?" Jaime asked. "Find the last entry?"

 

Daenerys nodded. She touched an ivory lever at the side - the image changed.

 

Now Aerys was talking urgently, quietly. "I do not know who will see this, who will find this. But whoever you are, please take this to my daughter, Princess Daenerys, if she lives..." A static burst wiped across the picture and the sound.

 

"Daenerys? My darling, this is bad. I don't know how long I've got before they find this room. I think Rhaella and your brother are dead." The sound and picture quality began to degrade.

 

Jaime glanced at Daenerys. Her face was wet: tears were brimming from her eyes, glistening down her cheeks. She seemed unaware that she was crying, made no attempt to wipe away the tears. She just stared at her father's image, listened to his words.

 

"Listen to me, girl," said her dead father. "Go to Islington...you can trust Islington...." the image said.

 

A loud bang came then.

 

"You?" Aerys said, and he stepped out of frame. For a moment, the picture remained unchanged - the desk, the blank white wall behind it.

 

Then blood splashed across the wall. Daenerys turned away.

 

"Islington." she said after a few moments.

 

"We have to go to the market first, to find you the bodyguard we talked about." Jaime said.

 

"You are a bodyguard." Dany stated.

 

"I was," Jaime said and pointed at the bloodstained wall. "And clearly, I was a shitty one."

 

"I'm sorry... I accused you that you should have been here." Daenerys muttered. "I didn't know you were only supposed to be there when my father left the house."

 

Jaime only nodded.

 

"You really think there's someone who can protect us from Viserys and Ramsay?" Daenerys asked.

 

"Well, if you offer them enough, yes." Jaime nodded. "But it's risky, there are only a few people we can trust." he said as he started to grab some things, getting ready to leave.

 

"Well, if I think about it, I'm the only one you should trust," he added. "And maybe that Jon guy, but he's not from here, so he probably forgot about you already."

 

Daenerys cleared her throat. "Yeah, he probably did...or he remembers and is pissed off, given how his life changed because of me."

 

Jaime stopped packing and stared in front of him for a few moments, deep in thought. "How was he able to see you if he's not from here?"

 

"I don't know." Danerys answered. She thought about it several times since they separated. She felt the guilt in her, knowing she probably ruined his life.

 

"Maybe he has relations to this place," Jaime said, then shook his head. "It doesn't matter, I was just curious."

 

Daenerys contemplated what he said, but decided not to think about it anymore. There are more important things in her mind now.

 

"We'd better go." was all Daenerys said.

 

***

 

_NOTES_

_Hey! Just as I promised, a new update! Hope you liked it! :)_

_Honestly, I'm not sure about how many chapters this story will have. I'm not really getting feedback, so as far as I know, only my lovely beta, Open_Sky, and I read this lol. But we enjoy it, and I enjoy writing it, so I will finish it. I'm just not sure I'm gonna write as many chapters as I originally planned :)_

_And don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to fish for compliments or comments or anything, it's just that I easily lose motivation if I don't know if you guys like it at all._

_To those of you who do follow it: hope you liked this chapter! :)_

 

 


	6. Below

The ATM took his card with a whirr. _Please enter your pin number_ , it said. Jon typed in his secret pin number. The screen went blank. _Please wait_ , it said, and the screen went blank again. Somewhere in the depths of the machine something grumbled and growled. _This card is invalid. Please connect your card issuer._ There was a chunking noise, and the card slid out again.

 

"Spare any change?" said a tired voice from behind him. Jon turned: the girl was short, dressed in boyish, dirty clothes. Her eyes were brown, her dark hair barely reached her shoulders. As much as he could see in the dark, she looked young, years younger than Jon. Jon didn't know why, but she looked familiar. He thought he saw her before, maybe she's living on these streets.

 

Jon handed the girl his card. "Here," he said. "Keep it. There are about fifteen hundred pounds in there if you can get to it."

 

She took the card in her street-blackened hands, looked at it, turned it over, and said, sarcastically, "Thanks! That will get me a nice cup of coffee."

 

She gave his card back, and began to walk down the street.

 

Jon picked up his bag. He was about to leave when it struck him - he quickly turned back to the girl.

 

"Hey. Hang on. You can see me."

 

"Nothing wrong with my eyes," the girl said.

 

"Yes, but..."Jon sighed. "I had a rather chaotic day, and I thought...I thought no one will see me ever again."

 

"Well, you know how it works for us, no?" the girl asked. "They normally don't even notice you exist unless you stop and talk to them. And even then, they forget you pretty quickly."

 

"What are you talking about?" Jon stared at the girl. "Who is _us_?"

 

The girl moved closer to him and furrowed her brows. She looked at him in disbelief, like her answer should be the most obvious thing in the world. " _Us_ " she pointed between them. "People from Below...  Are you not from Below?"

 

Jon sighed. "Listen," he said. "I have no idea what this below is, I just want my life back. There's a girl called Daenerys..." He sighed, turned away and began to walk down the street.

 

"Wait," the girl shouted. Jon looked back at her. "You were nice, trying to give me the money," she said as she walked over to him. "I can help you find her, actually, I'm going to the place she'll be tomorrow. The Market."

 

Jon felt relief. _Yes. I'll find Daenerys, and she'll help me get my life back._

 

Then he thought about what the girl just said to him.

 

_The Market_. He heard about that place before, but he didn't really remember where or when.

 

"Come on, I don't have much time," the girl's voice startled Jon. "We have to hurry."

 

Maybe it was unwise to follow a stranger, but Jon knew it was his only chance. She was the first person that day who talked to him more than a few words.

 

She hurried down some steps on the derelict houses at the side of the road—garbage-strewn steps, leading down to abandoned basement apartments. Jon went after her. At the bottom of the steps was a door, which the girl pushed open. She waited for Jon to go through, and shut the door behind them. Through the door, they were in darkness. There was a scratch, and the noise of a match flaring into life: the girl touched the match to the wick of an old railwayman's lamp, which caught, casting slightly less light than the match had, and they walked together through the dark place.

 

"What's your name?" Jon asked to break the silence.

 

"Arya." the girl answered.

 

"Jon."

 

"Can I ask a question?" he said

 

"Certainly not," the girl said immediately. "You don't ask any questions. You don't get any answers. You don't stray from the path. You don't even think about what's happening to you right now. Got it?"

 

"But—"

 

"Most importantly: no buts," Arya said. "And time is of the essence. Move." she pointed forward.

 

"What's this _below_ everyone's talking about?" he couldn't help but query, however got no answer as the girl only shushed him again.

 

Jon sighed and looked around, wondering where they were. He realized that he did not know very much about what went on beneath the streets of London. He walked nervously, worried that he'd catch his feet in something, that he'd stumble in the darkness and break his ankle. Arya strode forward nonchalantly. She appeared very familiar with the place.

 

"Well, I would ask you again where we are now. But I suppose you were going to refuse to tell me."

 

Arya grinned and nodded "Very good," she said, approvingly. "You are in enough trouble already."

 

"You can say that again," Jon uttered. "My fiancée’s dumped me, and I'll probably have to get a new telephone—"

 

Arya stopped suddenly and put the flare down on the ground, resting it against the wall, where it continued to sputter and flame, and she began to climb up on some metal rungs set into the wall. Jon hesitated, and then followed her. The rungs were cold and rusted; he could feel them crumbling roughly against his hands as he climbed, pieces of rust getting in his eyes and mouth. The scarlet light from below was flickering, and then it went out. They climbed in total darkness.

 

"So, are we going to find Daenerys?" Jon asked.

 

"Eventually. There's someone I have to fetch first," Arya said. "When we get into daylight, don't look down."

 

"What?" Jon asked confused. And then daylight hit his face, and he looked down.

 

It was daylight, but _how was it daylight_? a tiny voice asked in the back of his head. _It had been the middle of the night, what, an hour ago?_ , and he was holding onto a metal ladder that ran up the outside of a very high building... _but a few seconds ago he was climbing up the same ladder, and he had been inside, hadn't he?_ , and below him, he could see...London.

 

Tiny cars. Tiny buses and taxis. Tiny buildings. Trees. Miniature trucks. Tiny, tiny people. They swam in and out of focus beneath him.

 

He froze in his spot on the ladder.

 

"Somebody," said an amused voice above him, "wasn't listening, was he?"

 

"I..." Jon's throat didn't work. He swallowed, moistening it. "How is this possible?"

 

"Well, you asked about Below." Arya smiled at him. "Here you can see it firsthand. Now start climbing."

 

After a while, he found himself at the edge of a flat roof, and he stepped over it and collapsed.

 

He was aware that the girl was striding along the roof, away from him. Jon felt the rooftop with his hands and felt the solid structure beneath him. His heart was pounding in his chest.

 

"Davos," he heard the girl say. "Was everything alright?"

 

And then footsteps shuffled toward him, and a finger prodded him gently in the ribs. "You all right, lad?"

 

Jon opened his eyes. "Yes, thank you." he said.

 

A face, kind and creased, with grey beard stared at him. He was dressed in weird clothes, his body was wound round and about with ropes. Jon found himself remembering a theatrical performance of Robinson Crusoe he had been taken to as a child: this was what Robinson Crusoe might have looked like if he had been shipwrecked on a rooftop instead of a desert island.

 

"They call me Davos Seaworth, lad," said the man. He fumbled at a battered pair of glasses, on a string around his neck, and pulled them on, staring through them at Jon. "I don't recognize ya. What's your name?"

 

Jon pulled himself into a sitting position. They were on the roof of an old building, built of brownstone, with a tower above them.

 

He took a deep breath, but before he could answer, Arya started to speak.

 

"His name is Jon, he's not from here," she said, "He's looking for the princess."

 

Davos nodded then leaned closer to Jon."You had your life turned upside down, didn't ya?" he asked.

 

Jon only nodded while the man looked close into his eyes.

 

"If you're not from here, how come you..." Davos started, but stopped and thought about it.

 

"Maybe you're, you just don't know it." he simply shrugged. "I can see it in you."

 

Before Jon could answer it, all three of them turned their heads when they heard a sound. It was whining. Suddenly, a big pile of white furs ran toward them, so quickly, Jon barely had a chance to recognize what was it. It stopped at Arya's feet, whining happily.

 

A wolf. In the middle of London, on a rooftop.

 

Arya leaned down, hugged the wolf and spoke to him. "This is Ghost. We came here to fetch him."

 

"It's a wolf," Jon gulped. "It's huge."

 

"Yes, but don't worry, he won't hurt you unless I say so," Arya said. "He's my forever companion, but he couldn't come with me Above, so I had to leave him here for Davos to look after him."

 

"Thank you, Davos." she added while looking at the man.

 

Davos smiled at Arya. "It was my pleasure."

 

All the while, Jon just looked at the wolf and it looked back at him. Almost immediately, he felt some kind of connection to the animal, though he didn't know why. Then Ghost walked over to him and smelled him. He looked back into his eyes again and licked Jon's face. 

 

"I saw a wolf like him, before," Jon said as he petted Ghost on his head. "I dreamt about it."

 

Arya and Davos looked at each other, then both of them looked at Jon. "When?"

 

"Just a few times," Jon answered. "What?" he asked as he saw them looking at each other again.

 

"Nothing, lad." Davos shook his head.

 

"What this?" Arya asked suddenly. She walked past Davos and stopped at a table. She picked something up, it was a little silver box.

 

"It belongs to Ser Jaime" Davos said as he took it out of her hands. "He and the Princess were here not long ago to drop this off for me to keep it."

 

"Daenerys was here?" Jon asked as he walked to them, Ghost following closely behind.

 

"Yes," Davos said. "You can catch them at the Market."

 

"We're on our way there," Arya said. "Thank you again, for looking out for him.

 

***

 

"Who was that man?" Jon asked.

 

Arya snorted. "You haven't heard a word I've said, have you? You're in trouble already. Everything you do, everything you say, everything you hear, just makes it worse. You’d better pray you haven't already stepped too far in."

 

"Mind your head," she said, and she opened a door. Jon banged his forehead on something hard and said "ow," and then he stepped out through a low door, shielding his eyes from the light.

 

Jon rubbed his forehead, then he rubbed his eyes. The door they had just come through was the door to the broom closet in the stairwell of his apartment building. It was filled with brooms, an elderly mop and a huge variety of cleaning fluids, powders, and waxes. It had no stairs at the back of it that he could see, just a wall on which a stained old calendar hung.

 

Arya was examining the HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL? poster stuck beside Jon's front door. "Not her best side," she said. "This is your apartment, right?"

 

_I'm gonna lose my mind_ Jon thought.

 

"Yes," Jon nodded.

 

The three of them went inside and Jon was immediately struck with memories.  His now old life looked so far away – the lazy Sundays he spent here, watching TV; when his biggest problem was rather to order pizza or cook something for himself. But everything changed with the beautiful, silver-haired Daenerys.

 

Arya went to the bathroom and Jon followed her. She was looking at the little dragon mark on the wall while mumbling something to herself.

 

"What is that?" Jon asked but didn't get an answer. Arya moved pass him and went back to the living room.

 

"We have to go," she said. "Hurry."

 

"Tell me what is going on!" Jon snarled."What was that place? Who are you? Who's Daenerys? And what happened to me why no one saw me?"

 

Arya turned around and for the first time, Jon saw something similar to sympathy on her face.

 

"I will tell you what I can on the way," she sighed. "But we have to go now."

 

Jon looked into her eyes, then looked down to Ghost, who was sitting silently at Arya's legs.

 

Jon nodded and they left the apartment.

 

***

 

Jon and Arya walked in the darkness again, side-by-side, with Ghost following them close behind. She carried an improvised lamp made of a candle, a can, some wire, and a wide-mouthed glass lemonade bottle. Jon was surprised at how quickly his eyes became used to the near darkness. They seemed to be walking through a succession of underground vaults and storage cellars.

 

Sometimes he thought he could see movement in far corners of the vaults, but whether human or something else, it was always gone by the time they reached the place it had been. When he tried to talk to Arya about the movements, she hissed him to stay quiet.

 

He felt a cold draught on his face. The girl squatted without warning, put down her candle-lamp, and tugged and pulled hard at a metal grille set in the wall. It opened suddenly, sending her sprawling. She motioned Jon to come through. He crouched, edged through the hole in the wall; after about a foot, the floor stopped completely.

 

"Excuse me," Jon whispered. "There's a hole here."

 

"It's not a big drop," she told him. "Go on."

 

She shut the grille behind her. "Here," she said. She gave him the handle of her little lamp to hold, and she clambered down into the darkness. "There," she said. "That wasn't that bad, was it?"

 

Her face was a few feet below Jon's dangling feet. "Here. Pass me the lamp."

 

He lowered it down to her. She had to jump to take it from him.

 

"Now," she whispered. "Come on." He edged nervously forward, climbed over the edge, hung for a moment. He felt Ghost's nose nudging him on the back, so he let go. He landed on his hands and feet in soft, wet mud. He wiped the mud off his hands onto his sweater. A few feet forward, Arya was opening another door. They went through it, and she pulled it closed behind them.

 

"We can talk now," she said. "Not loud. But we can. If you want to."

 

"Oh. Thanks," Jon said. There were a thousand questions in his mind, but he couldn't think of anything to say.

 

"Come on," she said. "I know a shortcut. We can nip through London Above for a bit." They went up some stone steps, and the girl pushed open a door. They stepped through, and the door shut behind them.

 

Jon looked around, puzzled.  It was still night—or perhaps it was night once more. He was unsure how long they had been walking through the underplaces and the dark.

 

There was no moon, but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars. There were streetlights too, and lights on buildings and on bridges, which looked like earthbound stars, and they glimmered, repeated, as they were reflected with the city in the night water of the Thames. Arya blew out her candle, and Jon said, "Are you sure this is the right way?"

 

"Yes," she said. "Pretty sure."

 

They were approaching a wooden bench, and the moment he set eyes on it, it seemed to Jon like that bench was one of the most desirable objects he had ever seen. "Can we sit down?" he asked. "Just for a minute."

 

 She almost rolled his eyes. "Only a minute." They sat down at opposite ends of the bench. Ghost put his head on Jon's lap. "On Friday," Jon said, "I was with one of the finest investment analyst firms in London." He sighed. "Just reminding myself, really. Yesterday...it was like I didn't exist anymore, to anybody up here."

 

"That's 'cos you don't," Arya explained. "There's London Above—that's where you lived—and then there's London Below—the Underside— it's almost like a world from fairy-tales. Where people have wolves as friends," she said as she pointed to Ghost. "Or as wargs...there were dragons even, Targaryen dragons, but that was a long time ago. Below is inhabited by the people who fell through the cracks in the world. Now you're one of them."

 

"Or maybe you always were," she added. "As Davos said."

 

"As I said if you're part of London Below," she continued. "They normally don't even notice you unless you talk to them. And when you stop talking, or they get distracted for even a moment, they forget you immediately. "

 

"But I saw you," Jon said. It had been bothering him for a while."I saw Daenerys, she was bleeding and I helped her. Ygritte didn't want to, but I couldn't just leave her there."

 

"Ygritte?"

 

"My fiancée," Jon sighed. "She acted so weirdly."

 

"She was probably confused," Arya explained. "She saw Daenerys, but then didn't. Then she didn't really know what you were doing."

 

"Then why did I saw her?"

 

"I don't know," Arya shrugged. "Isn't that odd?"

 

"Everything's odd," Jon sighed and put his head in his hands.

 

They got up and walked away when a couple sat down on the bench, making out, clearly not noticing them.

 

"Have you always lived down there?" Jon asked.

 

"Nah. I was born up here," she hesitated. "You don't want to hear about me."

 

Jon realized, almost surprised, that he really did. "I do. Really."

 

"We're not there yet," Arya said simply. "It's enough for you to know that I was found by people from Below, who took care of me since I was a child."

 

 "Have you ever tried to return to all this?" he asked, gesturing. Quiet, warm, inhabited houses. Late-night cars. The real world...she shook her head. "You can't. It's one or the other. Nobody ever gets both."

 

***

 

Arya led Jon into a small park on the south side of the bridge, then down some stone steps, set beside a wall. She relit her candle-in-a-bottle, and then she opened a workman's door and closed it behind them. They went down some steps, with the darkness all around them.

 

"Daenerys," Jon said. "Do you know her?"

 

"Princess Daenerys. I know who she is." Arya answered as they walked through the dark corridor below the bridge.

 

"She's a Targaryen. Her family used to be very important."

 

"Used to be? Not anymore?"

 

Jon heard Arya sigh before she said, "Somebody killed them."

 

Yes, he remembered the guy Jaime saying something about that, now. He felt a pang in his heart then – it must have been awful. Loosing your whole family.

 

"What happened?" Jon asked.

 

Arya hesitated, then decided to answer. "Aerys, Daenerys's father wanted to unite our world with London Above. Someone didn't really like the idea."

 

"Some say Viserys did it, "she added. "You've met him, right?"

 

Viserys' name sent a shiver right down Jon's spine. "But isn't he her brother?"

 

"He is." Arya simply answered.

 

Jon was mad at her. Her appearance ruined his life, and she didn't even warn him, even though he's pretty sure she knew what would happen. But hearing about Daenerys's life made him feel sad. Sad for her. For that magical, mysterious, gorgeous woman, who was the sole reason for his misery now. But was that really the life he wanted to live? He loved Ygritte or convinced himself long ago that he did, and he had a comfortable life ahead of him.

 

He looked to Ghost then, who was walking between him and Arya. Then why was that the only time he felt truly free was in his weird wolf-like dreams?

 

_The dreams._

 

_That's where I heard about the market._

 

_And that's why the wolf looked so familiar. In his dreams, he was just like Ghost, a white wolf, with a_ _girl like Arya..._

 

They had reached the end of the corridor. Jon shook his head to chase his thoughts away.

 

"Where's this Market?" he asked.

 

"They hold it in a different place every time. It moves around. And to get to the place it'll be tonight...We'll have to go through a really nasty neighbourhood." She almost sounded scared.

 

"Are you scared to go there?"

 

"Oh. No. There's a truce in the market. If anyone hurt anyone there, the whole of London Below would be down on them like a ton of sewage," Arya laughed. "Getting there, on the other hand, won't be a fun ride."

 

***

 

"The Bridge isn't very far now," Arya said. Jon only hoped that was true.

 

They were now on their third candle. The walls flickered and oozed, the passageway seemed to stretch on forever. He was astonished that they were still under London: he was half-convinced that they had walked most of the way to Wales.

 

"We just left a bridge..."Jon said.

 

"Yes," Arya sighed."But not The Bridge. We need to cross The Bridge to get to the Market."

 

"The last one I went to was held in that big clock tower. Big...someone. And the next was—"

 

"Big Ben?" he suggested.

 

"Maybe. We were inside where all the big wheels went around, and that was where I got this—" She held up a knife. The candlelight glimmered on it. She smiled, like a child. "Do you like it?" she asked.

 

"It's great. Was it expensive?"

 

"I swapped some stuff for it. That's how things work down here. We swap stuff."

 

And then they turned a corner and saw the bridge. It could have been one of the bridges over the Thames, five hundred years ago, Jon thought; a huge stone bridge spanning out over a vast black chasm, into the night. But there was no sky above it, no water below. It rose into darkness. Jon wondered who had built it, and when. He wondered how something like this could exist, beneath the city of London, without everyone knowing. He felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He was, he realized, scared of the bridge itself.

 

"Do we have to go across it?" he asked. "Can't we get to the market some other way?" They paused at the base of the bridge.

 

Arya shook her head. "We can get to the place it's in, in Above," she said. "But the market wouldn't be there."

 

There was a buzz of voices behind them and Jon looked back. He looked up: a huge man, crudely tattooed, dressed in improvised rubber and leather clothes that looked like they had been cut out of the inside of cars, stared back at him, dispassionately. Behind the huge man were a dozen others, male and female: people who looked like they were on their way to a particularly low-rent costume party.

 

"Somebody," said a huge...very huge man, who was not in a good mood, "was in my way. Somebody ought to watch where he's going."

 

Ghost stepped between Jon and man. He glared at the big man and bared his teeth. The man took a step backward and turned away, and, taking the knot of people with him, he walked across the bridge and into the dark.

 

"He's fond of you." Arya said. Jon petted him on the head, his red eyes bearing into his.

 

"Are you crossing the bridge?" came a girl's voice not far from them.

 

Jon and Arya looked toward the voice. There stood a girl, in dirty clothes. She looked scared and was behind a bush.

 

"If you are crossing the bridge, I will go with you," she said again. "I'm scared to go alone."

 

"Safety in numbers. You're welcome to come with us," Arya said, after a moment's hesitation.

 

"My name's Jon. This is Arya and he's Ghost. She's the one us who knows what she's doing."

 

The girl moved closer, shyly,  "You're from London Above," she told him.

 

"Yes." As lost as he was in this strange other-world, he was at least learning to play the game. His mind was too numb to make any sense of where he was, or why he was here, but it was capable of following the rules.

 

"What's your name?" Jon asked.

 

"Irri." the girl said. Now that she was closer, Jon saw she was pale and thin, and very young.

 

"Have you crossed the Bridge before?" Arya asked her. The girl shook her head. "Well. Isn't this going to be fun?"

 

They walked toward the bridge. Arya handed Jon her candle-lamp.

 

"Here," she said.

 

"Thanks." Jon looked at the girl then Arya. "Is there anything, really, to be scared of?"

 

"Only the night on the bridge," she said.

 

"The kind in armor?"

 

"The kind that comes when the day is over."

 

Irri's little hand sought Jon's. He held it tightly, her tiny hand in his. She smiled at him, squeezed his hand. And then they set foot on the Bridge and Jon began to understand the darkness: darkness as something solid and real, so much more than a simple absence of light. He felt it touch his skin, questing, moving, exploring: gliding through his mind. It slipped into his lungs, behind his eyes, into his mouth...

 

With each step they took the light of the candle became dimmer. It felt not so much as if the lights were being turned down but as if the darkness were being turned up. Jon blinked and opened his eyes to nothing—nothing but darkness, complete and utter.

 

Sounds. A rustle, a squirm, a howl. Jon blinked, blinded by the night. The sounds grew nastier, hungrier. Jon imagined he could hear voices: a pack of huge, angry wolves, beneath the bridge...

 

Something slithered past them in the dark. "What's that?" Irri gasped.

 

Her hand was shaking in his.

 

"Shh," Arya whispered. "Don't attract its attention."

 

"What's happening?" Jon asked.

 

"Darkness is happening," Arya answered, very quietly.

 

There was a sputter, and a flare so bright it hurt, making Jon squint and stagger. It was the candle flame, in its lemonade-bottle holder. He had never known how brightly a single candle could burn. He held it up, gasping and gulping and shaking with relief. His heart was pounding and shuddering in his chest.

 

"It appears we have crossed successfully." Arya sighed, while Ghost nudged her hand with his nose. It seemed like even the wolf was scared...

 

Jon's heart was pounding in his chest so hard that, for a few moments, he was unable to talk. He forced himself to breathe slowly, to calm down.

 

"I suppose," Jon said, haltingly, "we weren't in any real danger... It was like a haunted house. A few noises in the dark...and your imagination does the rest. There wasn't really anything to be scared of, was there?"

 

Arya looked at him, almost pityingly; and Jon realized that there was nobody holding his hand. "Irri?"

 

"We'd better... We have to go back. She's..."

 

Arya took the candle from his hand and raised it. Light shone across the bridge. Jon could see all the way across the bridge. It was deserted.

 

"Where is she?" he asked.

 

"Gone," Arya sighed. "The darkness took her."

 

"We've got to do something," Jon said urgently.

 

"Such as?"

 

Once again, he opened his mouth. This time, he found no words. He closed it again.

 

"She's gone," Arya said and Ghost whined. "The bridge takes its toll. Be grateful it didn't take you too. Market's this way." She gestured toward a narrow passageway that rose up into the dimness in front of them, barely illuminated by the beam of the candle.

 

Jon did not move. He felt numb.

 

_I should have held onto her harder._

 

"Are you coming?"

 

Jon stood there in the darkness for a few pounding heartbeats, then followed them.

 

***

 

_NOTES_

_Thank you so much for the feedback! It's good to know you guys actually follow this! :)_

_From now on, updates will slow down. I'll post probably once a week._

_Until next time! xo_

 

_Ps. Huge thanks to Open_Sky for always helping me with this!:)_


	7. The Market

Jon followed Arya and Ghost up the steps. Stone steps edged with metal.

 

They were in an underground station. They joined a line of people waiting to slip through a grille, which had been opened a foot or so to uncover the door, which led out onto the pavement. Immediately in front of them were a couple of young boys, each with a string tied around their wrists. The strings were held by a pallid, bald man, who smelled of formaldehyde. Behind them in the line, there was a grey-bearded man with a black-and-white kitten sitting on his shoulder. It was intently licking the man's ear before curling up on his shoulder and going to sleep. The line moved slowly, as, one by one, the figures at the end slipped through the space between the grille and the wall, edging into the night.

 

"We'll have to wait a little." Arya said. Jon looked around and noticed more and more strange looking people. Well, at least they looked starnge to him, but he guessed they were considered normal in this world.

 

"I really hope we'll find the Princess." he voiced his concern. He didn't want to think about what he would do otherwise.

 

"She’ll be here with Ser Jaime," Arya nodded. "There's a word on the streets that she wants to hire a bodyguard – that's why I'm here."

 

"What do you mean?" Jon asked as the line finally moved forward a bit.

 

"You'll see." Arya smiled.

 

Jon wanted to ask about it but decided against it. He already learned it's better not to ask Arya twice about the same thing. If she wants to, she will tell him eventually.

 

"I hope you're right," Jon sighed. He has to find Daenerys, she's probably the only one who could help him. "I have to find her, I don't belong in this world."

 

He heard Arya clearing her throat, so he looked at her. She stared ahead to avoid his eyes and looked a little uncomfortable.

 

"What is it?" Jon asked.

 

Arya looked at him then and sighed. "I told you before," she said. "It's one or the other. Nobody ever gets both. And I'm not sure if there's a way for you to just go back."

 

"There has to be a way, I..." Jon said but was interrupted.

 

"You can't go back to your old home or your old job or your old life," Arya said, almost gently. "None of those things exist. Up there, you don't exist."

 

"I'll find Daenerys, and she'll help me go home." Jon said determinedly.

 

Arya only shrugged and walked with the moving line.

 

Jon noticed a little girl with a woman. They were dressed in black clothes, covered from neck to toes. The little girl was holding the woman's - probably her mother's - hand. She and the older woman had big canvas bags thrown older their shoulders. The girl must have felt Jon's eyes on her because she turned to look at him with a smile. He noticed the girl's teeth were blue. No, not like when a child eats a blue candy that leaves the teeth colored... Her teeth looked like it was naturally blue. Jon thought that a few days ago he would have been surprised by something like that, but now he only smiles back at the little girl. Seeing her made the numb feeling surface again.

 

He looked at Arya and asked the question he had not dared to voice until this moment. "Is she dead? Irri?"

 

Arya glanced at him. "Yes. Or as good as."

 

Jon shivered at the thought. "She can be alive?" he asked.  They were approaching the front of the line.

 

"She's not the kind of dead which you think 'being dead' means. Darkness took her. She'll probably never be seen again, but sometimes...Sometimes they come back..."

 

_So there's at least a tiny chance,_ Jon thought. Tiny, but enough to soothe his guilt for a little while.

 

They were walking with the crowd for a while in silence.

 

"I realized I never asked," Jon said. "What do you do?"

 

Arya smiled. "I sell personal physical services."

 

"Oh," he said. "What kind of personal physical services?" he asked.

 

"I rent my body." She did not elaborate.

 

"Ah." He was too weary to pursue it, to press her to explain just what she meant.

 

And then they stepped out into the night and Jon looked back.

 

The sign on the station said KNIGHTSBRIDGE. He didn't know whether to smile or to mourn. It felt like the small hours of the morning. Jon looked down at his watch and was not surprised to notice that the digital face was now completely blank. Perhaps the batteries had died, or, he thought, more likely, time in London Below had only a passing acquaintance with the kind of time he was used to. He did not care. He unstrapped the watch and put it in his pocket. He noticed a few hours ago that he lost his bag, he must have put it down and left it. Or he lost it on the bridge - he wasn't quite sure, and he certainly didn't care about it now.

 

The odd people were crossing the road in a stream. "There?" he said, appalled.

 

Arya nodded. "There."

 

Jon, who had spent many weekend hours trailing behind Ygitte through every part of London, recognized it immediately.

 

"Hyde Park?"

 

Arya nodded. "Only for tonight," she said. "The next market could be anywhere."

 

The three of them walked on W Carriage Dr. Next to Arya, Ghost wagged his tail excitedly, enjoying the fresh air after hours of being underground. 

 

A few minutes later, they reached the Market. Color and light broke over Jon like a wave hitting the shore. When his eyes adjusted to the brightness, he looked around. The sight was nothing he saw before in his life.

 

It was like the biggest fair in the world.

 

Jon just stood there, alone in the throng, drinking it in. It was pure madness – of that there was no doubt at all. It was loud and brash, and insane, and it was, in many ways, quite wonderful.

 

People argued, haggled, shouted, sang. They hawked and touted their wares, and loudly declaimed the superiority of their merchandise. Music was playing – a dozen different kinds of music, being played in a dozen different ways on a score of different instruments, most of them improvised, improved, improbable.

 

Arya turned to him – she yawned, catlike, shading her mouth with the back of her hand. And then she smiled, and said, "Well. You're here. Safe and, more or less, sound. I have business to attend to. Fare you well." She nodded curtly and slipped away into the crowd.

 

"Wait!" Jon shouted, but she was gone. Ghost was still sitting there and gazed at Jon. He whined and looked back and forth, between him and the way Arya went. Then he got up and went after her.

 

"Perfect." Jon murmured to himself.

 

***

 

Jon could smell food. All kinds of food—the smells of curries and spices seemed to predominate, with, beneath them, the smells of grilling meats and mushrooms.

 

Everybody was buying. Everybody was selling. Jon listened to the market cries as he began to wander through the crowds.

 

"Weapons! Arm yourself! Defend your cellar, cave, or hole! Do you want to hit 'em? We got 'em. Come on darling, come on over here..."

 

A man in armor beat a small drum and chanted, "Lost Property. Roll up, roll up, and see for yourself. Lost property. None of your found things here. Everything guaranteed properly lost."

 

Jon wandered through the huge rooms of the store, like a man in a trance. He was unable to even guess how many people there were at the night market. A thousand? Two thousand? Five thousand?

 

He passed a stall selling glittering gold and silver jewelry, another selling jewelry made from what looked like the valves and wires of antique radios; there were stalls that sold every manner of books and magazines; others that sold clothes – old clothes patched, and mended, and strangely made. Several tattooists; something that he was almost certain was a small slave market (he kept his distance from this); a dentist's chair, with a hand-operated manual drill, with a line of miserable people standing beside it, waiting to have their teeth pulled or filled by a young man who seemed to be having altogether too good of a time; a bent old man selling unlikely things that might have been hats and might have been modern art; something that looked very much like a portable shower facility; even a blacksmith's...

 

And in every few stalls there would be somebody selling food. Some of them had food cooked over open fires: curries, and potatoes, and chestnuts, and huge mushrooms, and exotic bread.

 

He tried to pick out distinct groups: there were the ones who looked like they had escaped from a historical reenactment society; the ones who reminded him of hippies; the albino people in gray clothes and dark glasses; the polished, dangerous ones in smart suits and black gloves; the huge, almost identical women who walked together in twos and threes and nodded when they saw each other; and a hundred other types and kinds...

 

He wondered how normal London – his London – would look to an alien, and that somehow made him bold. He began to ask the people as he went.

 

"Excuse me? I'm looking for a man named Jaime and a woman called Daenerys. Do you know where can I find them?" People shook their heads, apologized, averted their eyes, moved away.

 

Jon found himself conducting the negotiations for a cottage cheese and lettuce sandwich and a cup of what looked and smelled like home-brewed lemonade. His food cost him his broken watch.

 

As he finished the last of the sandwiches, he realized that he had no idea how anything he had just eaten had tasted; and he resolved to slow down and chew the cookies more slowly. He sipped the lemonade, making it last.

 

"You need anything, sir?" asked a familiar voice, close at hand. "I sell advice. Bad and great. Old wisdom or encouragement for the young. Anything you want."

 

"No, thank you." Jon said and turned around.

 

The hand-painted sign above the stall said:

 

DAVOS SEAWORTH'S

 

There were other, smaller, signs scattered about:

 

YOU WANT IT, WE KNOW IT.

 

"Information, then?" Davos continued. "Roof-maps? History? Secret and mysterious knowledge? If I don't know it, it's probably better forgotten. That's what I say."

 

The old man was still wrapped around with ropes and cords. He blinked at Jon, then pulled on the pair of spectacles tied around his neck with string. He inspected Jon carefully through them. "Hang on – I know you. You were with Arya. On the rooftops. Remember? Eh? I'm Davos. Remember me?" He thrust out his hand, pumped Jon's hand furiously.

 

"Actually," Jon started. "I'm looking for Princess Daenerys and a man called Jaime. I think they're probably together."

 

"Information! Information!" he announced to the crowd. "What'll you give me?" asked Davos.

 

"I don't have any money," Jon said awkwardly. "And I just gave my watch away."

 

"Do not fear, you seem like a good lad," he sang. "Your quest is at an end. Go down there, walk around till you take 20 breaths. You can't miss them. They're auditioning." His outstretched arm showed him the direction.

 

_Auditioning?_ Jon thought and then he smiled. It didn't matter. His quest, as the mad old roof-man had put it, was at an end.

 

***

 

Daenerys was sitting on a roof of one of the stalls with Jaime.

 

In front of the stall, there stood two men. One of them was No Name, and looked somewhat like one who hadn't been able to find real clothes and had had to do with what he could find at the Salvation Army store. His face was white with powder, his lips painted red. Ron, the opponent, resembled a bad dream one might have if one fell asleep watching sumo wrestling on the television. He was a huge man who pretty much resembled to an obese and enormous baby.

 

They were standing face to face, in the middle of a cleared circle of spectators and other bodyguards and sightseers. They stared at each other, without breaking eye contact.

 

But Daenerys didn't really pay attention to them. She gazed down at her hand, folded in her lap. Ever since they left the House with the Red Door, she kept thinking about Jon.

 

Jaime was right, he must have forgotten her already...

 

But still, her guilt built up inside her. Because of her, his life is in ruins now, and there's nothing she can do about it. Not that she wanted it to happen. Once you get involved with the world below, there's no going back. If she knew what would happen when she was trying to get away from Viserys and Ramsay, she wouldn't have done it. She wouldn't have ruined his life. But there must be a reason why the door she opened brought her to him.

 

And he saw her. Not for seconds, or until she stopped talking to him.

 

When she woke up in his apartment and found him sleeping on the couch, she observed him. He was handsome – really handsome, with his perfectly trimmed beard and gorgeous locks. And kind, given how he helped her.

 

Then he woke up and started to talk to her. She was surprised... He was not supposed to be seeing her unless he's from Below.

 

She will make it right. Sometime, somehow, she will make it right.

 

Jaime tapped Daenerys on the shoulder and pointed. Something was about to happen.

 

One moment there were two men standing impassively, just looking at each other, then the No Name's head rocked back as if he'd just been hit in the face. A small, reddish purple bruise appeared on his cheek. He pursed his lips and fluttered his eyelashes.

 

"La," he said, then stretched his rouged lips wide, in a ghastly parody of a smile.

 

No Name gestured. Ron staggered and clutched his stomach.

 

No Name smirked outrageously, waggled his fingers, and blew kisses to several spectators. Ron stared angrily at him, redoubling his mental assault. Blood began to drip from the No Name's lips. His left eye started to swell. He staggered. The audience muttered appreciatively.

 

"It's not as impressive as it looks," Jaime whispered to Daenerys.

 

No Name stumbled, suddenlydropping to his knees, as if someone was forcing him down, and fell, awkwardly, to the floor. Then he jerked as if someone had just kicked him, hard, in the stomach. Ron looked triumphant. The spectators clapped, politely. No Name writhed and spat blood onto the ground. He was dragged off by his friends, and was violently sick.

 

"Next," Jaime shouted.

 

The next would-be bodyguard was almost as big as Ron. He was shaven-headed, and he sneered at the world through rotten teeth. "I'm Gregor," he said, and he hawked, and spat green on the ground.

 

He walked into the ring.

 

"When you're ready, gentlemen," Jaime said.

 

Suddenly, a small cut opened on Gregor's forehead, and blood began to drip from it into one eye. Gregor ignored it and instead appeared to be concentrating on his right arm. He pulled his arm up slowly, like a man fighting a great deal of pressure.

 

Then he slammed his fist into Ron's nose, which began to spurt blood. Ron drew one long, horrible breath, and hit the ground with the sound of half a ton of wet liver being dropped into a bathtub.

 

Gregor wiped the blood from his forehead and bared his ruined mouth at the world in an appalling grin. "Come on," he said. "Fat bastard. Hit me again."

 

"That one's promising," Jaime whispered.

 

Daenerys raised an eyebrow. "He doesn't look very nice."

 

"He looks dangerous."

 

There was a murmur of appreciation, then, as Gregor did something rather fast and painful to Ron, something that involved the sudden connection of Gregor's fingers with Ron's eyeballs.

 

Jaime clapped politely with the rest of them. "Very good, sir," he said.

 

Gregor looked at Daenerys before he returned his attention to Ron. Daenerys shivered, even though the man was auditioning to be her bodyguard, she felt scared of him.

 

She thought back to the last time she felt safe - and found herself wishing Jon would be sitting there by her side.

 

***

 

Jon heard the clapping and walked toward it.

 

The audience had their back to him. Jon wondered if he would easily be able to find Daenerys and Jaime - and then the crowd parted, and he saw them both, sitting on the roof of one of the stalls. 

 

He was again mesmerized by her - sitting there, she looked fragile, but no less a princess.

 

He opened his mouth to shout out Daenerys's name. He did so, but he realized why the crowd had parted, as an enormous man came catapulting through the crowd as if tossed by a giant, landing squarely on top of him.

 

He saw a pair of concerned violet eyes before the darkness took him.

 

***

 

Different vegetables, meats, sausages and thousands of different smells. He walked through the stalls, observing the crowd again.

 

But it felt different this time.

 

Somehow, he was smaller than the most of them.

 

He looked up when he felt a hand on his head and saw a familiar face.

 

_Arya._

 

They were wandering around, in the Market. The same Market he was at, only a few moments ago, before....

 

Before he spotted Daenerys.

 

Then a huge man came flying at him, and the impact must have knocked him out.

 

He was a wolf again, he realized. But not any wolf.

 

_Ghost._

 

Was he always Ghost when he had these dreams?

 

_No, that's silly_ – he only met Arya and Ghost not long ago.

 

He couldn't be Ghost then, but he's definitely Ghost _now._

 

But maybe, maybe he was. Maybe he knows so little about himself. He's not sure about anything anymore.

 

Maybe that's why Ghost liked him immediately, and that is why Arya looked so familiar. _Because he saw her before._

 

He then saw the crowd, heard the clapping and...

 

What the hell?

 

He saw himself, lying on the ground. Daenerys leaned over him, his face in her hands as she shook him gently.

 

_I'm really going to lose my mind_ was his final thought before he opened his eyes.

 

***

 

"Jon?" he heard her voice before he saw her.

 

He opened his eyes. The face swam in and out of focus. Violet eyes, peering into his brown ones, from a pale, angelic face.

 

"Daenerys?" he said.

 

She looked surprised and...was that a smile?

 

"Seven Hells, Jon. I don't believe it. What are you doing here?" she asked exasperatedly.

 

"It's nice to see you, too," Jon mumbled, weakly. He sat up and wondered if he was suffering from a concussion. He wondered how he'd know if he was.

 

Daenerys stared intently at her hands as if she did not trust herself to say anything else. She avoided his eyes.

 

The big man was now fighting with a dwarf. They were fighting with hammers, and the fight was not as unequal as one might have imagined. The dwarf was surprisingly fast – he ducked, he bounced, he dove, his every movement made Gregor appear lumbering and awkward by comparison.

 

Jon turned to Jaime, who was watching the fight intently.

 

"What is happening?" he asked.

 

The man spared him a glance, and then returned his gaze to the action in front of them.

 

"You," he said, "are out of your league, in deep shit, and, I would imagine, a few hours away from an untimely and undoubtedly messy end. We, on the other hand, are auditioning bodyguards."

 

Gregor connected his hammer with the dwarf, who instantly stopped bouncing and darting, and fell to the ground, lying there insensible.

 

"I think we've seen enough," Jaime told Daenerys, then turned to the crowd and announced loudly.

 

"Thank you all. Mister Gregor, if you could wait behind?"

 

Jon saw out the corner of his eyes that Daenerys looked at him every once in a while. He turned to her and saw the sadness and guilt in her eyes.

 

_So you did know what will happen to me._

 

"Why did you have to come here?" Daenerys whispered to Jon, but her voice broke and her face contorted in hurt.

 

"I didn't really have much choice, did I?"

 

She sighed. Jaime was walking around, dismissing the various bodyguards who had already auditioned. Gregor waited patiently, off to one side. Daenerys looked at him.

 

She didn't really trust the guy.

 

"How did you get to the market?" she asked Jon.

 

"There was this girl and her wolf— " Jon began.

 

"Wolf?" She raised an eyebrow, cocked her head slightly on one side. "A girl with a wolf brought you here?"

 

"Most of the way," he nodded. "That wolf...I know it sounds crazy but I dreamt about him before. And the girl."

 

"What do you mean?" she snapped her head towards him. "You saw the wolf or were you the –

 

But before she could finish Jaime had returned. He stood in front of Gregor, who looked pleased with himself.

 

"Weapons expertise?" he asked.

 

"Few," said Gregor. "Put it like this. If you can cut someone with it, blow someone's head off with it, break a bone with it, or make a nasty hole in someone with it, then the Mountain's the master of it."

 

"Well," Jaime looked at Daenerys then back at Gregor. "We're all very impressed with your skill."

 

"I had heard," said a female voice, "that you had put out a call for bodyguards. Not for enthusiastic amateurs."

 

Jon recognized her immediately.

 

"That's her," he whispered to Daenerys. "The girl."

 

Arya looked at Jaime. "You've finished the trials?" she asked.

 

"Not necessarily," Jaime said.

 

"Then," she told him. "I would like an audition."

 

There was a beat before Jaime answered.

 

 "Very well," and stepped backward.

 

Gregor – or as he called himself, the Mountain – was undoubtedly dangerous, not to mention a bully, a sadist, and actively harmful to the physical health of those around him. What he was not, though, was particularly quick on the uptake.

 

"I have to fight her?" he asked in disbelief.

 

"Yes," Arya said. "Unless you'd like a little nap, first."

 

Near his hand, on the floor, was the hammer he had used in the fight with the dwarf. He grabbed it, slammed it into the Arya's face— or would have, had she not ducked out of the way. He was not entirely sure what happened after that: only that the world swung out from under him, and then he was lying, face down, on the ground, with a dagger at his throat and a white wolf close to his face, snarling.

 

"Enough!" Jaime shouted.

 

Arya looked up, still holding her dagger to his throat.

 

"Well?" she said.

 

"Very impressive." Jaime said and Daenerys nodded.

 

Jon was awestruck.

 

She was a part of London Below. He understood that now. And as he thought that, he thought about London Above, and a world in which no one fought like this—no one needed to fight like this—a world of safety. He felt homesick suddenly, but then thought about it – was it safety and peace what he really wanted?

 

"I'm afraid we won't need your services after all." Arya got off Gregor and put her dagger away in her belt.

 

"And you are called?" Jaime asked.

 

"I'm Arya," she said. "But maybe you know me as No One."

 

Nobody said anything. Then Daenerys spoke, hesitantly.

 

"The No One?"

 

Arya simply nodded and petted Ghost.

 

A bell sounded somewhere, twice, a deep bonging noise.

 

"Five minutes," Jaime muttered, then he said, to the remains of the crowd, "I think we've found our bodyguard. Thank you all very much. Nothing more to see."

 

Arya walked over to them.

 

"I told you'll see." she smirked at Jon.

 

Then she turned to Daenerys and looked her up and down.

 

"Can you stop people from killing me?" Daenerys asked.

 

"Yes, we can," she said as she pointed to Ghost. "If you don't do anything reckless."

 

Gregor got up by then and made a move toward Arya, who was standing with her back to him, but stopped when he saw Ghost snarling at him. He backed away to a safe distance, plainly scared and furious, watching Arya. "You're dead. You're fucking dead, you are!" he shouted when he reached a safe distance.

 

"Amateurs." Arya sighed.

 

Little did they know, two men dressed in suits watched the whole scene from a distance. One of them almost laughed, but the other twirled the dragon ring on his finger while staring at his sister in anger...

 

***

 

_NOTES_

_Hi guys! Hope you enjoyed, tell me what you think ;)_

_Till' next time! xo_

 

_HUGE THANKS again to Open_Sky for the help! I would be nowhere without it! :)_

 

 


	8. The Alliance

As impressive as the market had been to watch, Jon found the speed at which it was being dismantled, broken down, and put away even more impressive. All evidence that had ever been there was vanishing - stalls were being taken apart, loaded onto people's backs, hauled off into the streets. Jon noticed Davos; the old man waved happily at him and disappeared into the night.

 

The crowd dispersed and Hyde Park quickly looked exactly as it did a few hours ago. It was like the market had never even existed.

 

"Arya," Jaime said suddenly as they were about to leave the park. "I've heard of you, of course. Where have you been all this time?"

 

"Here and there," Arya shrugged. "I had some work to do."

 

They stepped out onto the pavement of London at night. Jon stared at the road ahead of them. Everything seemed so normal, so quiet, so sane. For a moment, he felt like all he needed to get his life back would be to hail a taxi and tell the driver to take him home. And then he would sleep the night through in his own bed. Yet he knew how impossible that was.

 

"So what now?" he asked.

 

No answer. Daenerys would not meet his eyes, Jaime simply ignored him. He felt like a small child, unwanted, following the bigger children around, and that made him irritated. "Look," he said, clearing his throat, "I know you are all very busy people. But what about me?"

 

At that, they all finally turned to him. He didn't look at Arya or Jaime, but only Daenerys. Her face held a pained expression.

 

"How do I get back to normal again? It's like I've walked into a nightmare. Last week everything was. . . normal, and now just nothing makes any sense. . . " He trailed off. Swallowed. "I want to know how to get my life back." he explained.

 

"Can you give us a second?" Daenerys asked Arya and Jaime. Arya nodded and walked away, Jaime eyed Jon suspiciously, then followed Arya and Ghost.

 

"You won't get it back by traveling with us, Jon," Daenerys sighed. "It's going to be hard enough for you anyway. I. . . I am really sorry. I don't know why that door led me to you, but believe me, I wish I could take it all back."

 

"You mean to tell me there is no way? There has to be a solution." Jon said, but looking into those violet eyes which held so much emotion, he already knew the answer - there isn't.

 

"I'm so sorry, Jon." she whispered.

 

"How can you say that? I lost my life because of you and you don't even try to help me get it back." Jon groaned and continued when she wanted to say something. "The last two days I have spent wandering around in sewers and crossing weird bridges. Bridges that, by the way, kill people! Going from night to day and back to night again!" he snapped. He didn't want to yell at her, but it felt so good to finally let it all out.

 

"Jon, I think you have. . . ties to our world, "she murmured while looking at him with seriousness. " You were not supposed to see me, see us."

 

"What? That's impossible."

 

"Is it?"

 

There's no way. . . _how could there be_? Then Jon thought about the conversations he had with his mother when he was a child. . . the way she always closed up when he asked her about his father. How she always avoided the topic. _Could it be possible_?

 

Daenerys's hand on his forearm shook him out of his thoughts.

 

"I really don’t know what to do," she said, but averted his eyes.

 

"Come with us then," she proposed after a few moments. He was mad at her, mad at the world, but Seven Hells, her gentle eyes and her hand on his arm made him feel comforted. "We'll figure something out after all of this is done. Because you're right, this is all my fault. I don’t want to leave you again to deal with it alone."

 

He looked at her then: a petite creature with huge, violet eyes, staring at him urgently from a pale face. She really looked like a princess.

 

 _Okay_ , he said to himself. _I guess I'm not quite ready to just give up and die._ "Well, I don't have anywhere else to be right now," he said. "Why not?"

 

Her face changed. She smiled at him and her eyes glimmered with happiness.

 

"And we will try to get you back home again," she said. "I promise. Once we've found what I'm looking for."

 

He wondered if she meant it. He suspected that what she was offering might be impossible. But he pushed that thought out of his head.

 

"What are you looking for, anyway?" he asked, cheering up a little.

 

Daenerys took a deep breath and answered after a long pause. "It's a long story," she said, solemnly. "Right now we're looking for an angel named Islington."

 

"An angel?" he said, chuckling. "Called Islington?"

 

"We should go now, Princess," Jaime shouted from where he stood with Arya and Ghost. "Say your goodbyes."

 

"Jon's coming with us," she said as she and Jon walked over to join them. "I'm the reason for his current situation and I'll help him get back to his old life."

 

Jaime looked at him, then not so subtly suppressed a laugh.

 

"If you can survive the next one or two days," he confided, "you might even make it through a whole month."

 

"We'll keep him safe." Daenerys snarled. "That's the least I can do."

 

Arya just shrugged. "One less or more doesn't matter to me." she said then knelt down on the pavement. She took a small metal rod from her belt and used it to unlock the cover to a sewer. She pulled up the sewer cover, looked into it warily, climbed down, then ushered Daenerys into the sewer.

 

"Alright, but be warned young man," Jaime said as he scratched the side of his nose. "Travelling in magic and darkness. . . it's not gonna be an easy ride."

 

He began to climb down the sewer ladder. Jon caught the sewer cover before it could close and followed them down. It smelled like drains at the top of the sewer—a dead, soapy, cabbagey smell. He expected it to get worse as he went down, but instead, the smell quickly dissipated as he approached the floor. He could see the lights of the others up ahead, and he ran and splashed down the tunnel until he caught up with them.

 

***

 

The Underground station was quite empty and quite dark. Gregor walked through it, keeping close to the walls, darting nervous looks behind him, and in front of him, and from side to side. He had picked the station at random, had headed for it over the rooftops and through the shadows, making certain that he was not being followed. He was not heading back to his lair. Too risky. There were other places where Gregor had hidden weapons and food. He would lay low until all this was over.

 

He stopped beside a ticket machine and listened, in the darkness: absolute silence. Reassured that he was alone, he allowed himself to relax. He stopped at the top of the spiral staircase and drew a deep breath.

 

"The Mountain is the finest fighter in London Below. You told us yourself." a voice said from behind him.

 

"It's not nice to lie, Gregor." Another voice joined in. Gregor froze because even though he met them only once, he knew exactly to whom those voices belonged. "We don't tolerate liars."

 

"I have to say, I regard it as a personal betrayal, and I was deeply wounded by it. And disappointed. When you don't have any redeeming features, you don't take particularly kindly to disappointment, do you, Viserys?"

 

"Not kindly at all, Ramsay."

 

Gregor threw himself forward, and ran, headlong in the dark, down the spiral staircase. The sound of his steps echoed throughout the stairwell.

 

He reached the bottom of the steps and looked around, frightened.

 

Something clanked, and the elevator doors opened, magnificently and slowly, flooding the passageway with light.  He heard a polite cough behind him, and he turned.

 

Ramsay was sitting on the steps, at the bottom of the spiral staircase. He was picking his fingernails.

 

He turned back to the elevator as Viserys stepped out of it.

 

He knew it then.

 

There's no way out.

 

When Viserys and Ramsay were finished, one would have been hard put to even notice the slight stain on the floor at the bottom of the spiral staircase.

 

The next time the floors were washed, it was gone forever.

 

***

 

Arya was in the lead a few meters ahead. Daenerys and Jon walked in the middle with Ghost in Jon's heels. Jaime took up the rear a few meters behind them. None of them had said a word since they got down.

 

It was her fault. She knew that was true. She had opened a door to someone who could help her. He had taken her somewhere warm, and he had cared for her. The action of helping her had tumbled him from his world into hers. Or was it _their_ s now?

 

She wondered if it was simply the door that she had opened, that had taken her to him, which had allowed him to notice her, or if there was, somehow, more to it than that.

 

Maybe it was foolish to take him with them. She was unsure that - even in the company of Arya, Ghost and Jaime - they would be able to take care of themselves on the journey that laid ahead of them.

 

"You saved my life," she told him. "You could have left me on the sidewalk. But you didn't. And I don't even remember thanking you."

 

Jon looked at her and Daenerys found herself caught by his gaze. _So honest. . . so kind. . .she felt like she could get lost in them if she wasn’t careful enough._

 

"It's alright," he smiled, raising his eyebrows in resignation. "I couldn't have just left you there." Ghost came closer to his legs and nudged his hand with his nose. Daenerys watched as Jon smiled and burrowed his hand in the wolf's fur.

 

"The dreams you told me about earlier," she asked. "Do you often have them?"

 

Jon met her eyes and nodded. "More and more often. I have to admit I like them pretty much. Being a wolf feels free."

 

She noticed how he sighed the last world.

 

"So it happens only when you're dreaming?"

 

"Yes. Why?"

 

"It's nothing just," Daenerys shook her head. "Wargs lived here a long time ago, but they're gone now. Some think they're gone forever, not one left."

 

"Wargs?"

 

"People who could enter their minds," she said and pointed at Ghost. "They became the wolf."

 

"You don't mean to tell me. . . " Jon whispered. He knew what she was hinting, but there was no way...

 

_Right?_

 

***

 

There were candles all over the Great Hall. Candles stood by the iron pillars that held the roof up, by the waterfall that ran down one wall and into the small rock-pool below, clustered on the sides of the rock wall, huddled on the floor. Candles were set into candlesticks by the huge door that stood between two dark iron pillars. The door was built of polished black flint set into a silver base that had tarnished, over the centuries, almost to black. The candles were unlit; but as the tall form walked past, they flamed up. No hand touched them, no fires touched their wicks.

 

The figure's robe was simple and white. . . or more than white. A color, or an absence of all colors, so bright as to be startling. Its feet were bare on the cold rock floor of the Great Hall. Its face was pale and wise, and gentle; and, perhaps, a little lonely.

 

It was very beautiful.

 

Soon every candle in the Hall was burning. It paused by the rock pool, knelt beside the water, cupped its hands, lowered them into the clear water, raised them and drank. The water was cold but very pure. When it had finished drinking the water it closed its eyes for a moment, as if in benediction. Then it stood up and walked away, back through the Hall, the way it had come from and the candles went out as it passed, as they had done for tens of thousands of years. It had no wings, but still, it was unmistakably an angel.

 

Islington left the Great Hall and the last of the candles went out, and the darkness returned.

 

***

 

"This way," Arya said, gesturing elegantly after walking in the tunnels for. . . who knows how long.

 

"Don't all these tunnels look the same?" Jon asked. "How can you tell which is which?"

 

"You can't," Jaime said sadly. "We're hopelessly lost. We'll never be seen again. In a couple of days, we'll be killing each other for food."

 

"Really?" He hated himself for rising to the bait, even as he said it.

 

"No." Jaime's expression said that torturing Jon was too easy. Jon found that he cared less and less about what these people thought of him, however. Except, perhaps, Daenerys.

 

"Alright, we're stopping for a while," Arya announced. "We should get some rest, especially you, Princess. We may need your skills later."

 

They were back on the streets again, after walking in the tunnels for hours. Was it London Below or the other world. . . Jon couldn't really decide it anymore.

 

They stopped before an old looking building. It looked like an abandoned casino. "Wait here," Arya said while looking through the dark windows. "I'll check it first."

 

"Me too," Jaime said as he started to remove the chains that held the door together. "Stay here Princess and just shout if anything's wrong."

 

"I'll leave Ghost here with you," Arya said as she bowed down to the wolf. "Stay, Ghost. Protect them."

 

The wolf wagged his tail, then immediately went into work-mode. He started to circle Daenerys and Jon, sniffed them. He then sat down in front of them, blocking them between him and the wall. Jaime managed to free the door from the chains and the two of them disappeared into the dark building.

 

"What did she mean?" Jon asked as he turned to Daenerys. She looked at him with a questioning look. "Your skills...?"

 

"Oh," Daenerys sighed. "It's not easy to create doors. . . I often get tired after I do it too much. I guess she meant to save my energy for when it's necessary."

 

"Right," Jon nodded. "So they can't do what you can?"

 

"No, no they can't," Daenerys shook her head. She must have seen the confusion on his face because she took a deep breath.

 

"My house, the Targaryens were the only openers left," she started. "You see, others can travel between the two worlds through actual doors if they know where to look for them, and which one to use.

The Targaryens, on the other hand. . . we have the ability to create doors. To open everything that is closed. That's how I ended up coming out of a wall when you met me." she smiled.

 

"I thought I was crazy." Jon smiled back.

 

"No, you're not," Daenerys reassured him. "There were other families who had the same ability, but they died centuries ago. We were the only ones left. Whenever I open a door somewhere, our sigil appears. The three-headed dragon."

 

"Arya told me dragons lived in your world, long ago. . ."

 

"They did," Daenerys nodded. "My ancestors even rode them. That's why it's our sigil. But they disappeared about three centuries ago."

 

"Disappeared?" Jon asked with raised eyebrows.

 

"Yes, nobody knows how. It's not like they died. . . they just simply vanished from one they to another. No trace behind. . . it's like someone just snapped their fingers and they were gone." Daenerys explained and took a deep breath. "I wish I could see one. My father had a big stuffed dragon hanging from the ceiling in his office. When I was little I often imagined it was real."

 

Jon noticed her eyes filled with tears when she started to talk about her father. He suddenly felt the urge to hug her, to wipe her tears away. But instead, "What happened?" he asked. "I mean, you don't have to talk about it. . . "

 

"No, it's alright," she sighed. "Uhm. . . my father, for years, worked on it to unite all London Below, to live in peace. He even wanted to unite with us London Above, your world. He had this image that one day, we could live side by side, in peace. He wanted us to learn from you, and you to learn from us."

 

"There are people who didn't like his idea, though. Like my brother," she looked down at her hands, but still, Jon could see the pain in her eyes. "He was always jealous because he didn't have the ability like I do. It happens, sometimes. Some have it, some don't."

 

"My father was an excellent opener. He taught me everything. My other brother, Rhaegar, he couldn't do it either, but he didn't mind. He found his love other things, like music and poetry. But Viserys. . . he went mad. He was so angry all the time. . . whenever I opened something, he lashed out at me."

 

"So someone used his anger, someone who didn't support my father's idea. One day I went home and found them dead. My mother, father, and Rhaegar. At first, I didn't want to believe Viserys did it, but he attacked me too. I ran, but I was so sad and tired that I couldn't open a door. After days of running, I almost gave up, but a voice in me said I can't. So I took my last shot and thought about somewhere safe. . . someone safe. And it led me to you."

 

Jon couldn't really find words. He was mad at her earlier, he thought because of her, he lost his comfortable life. But hearing her story, he couldn't help but feel sorry for her. This girl, so young, had to live through all that. They were about the same age, and if he had to survive all of that. . . he wasn't sure he could have.

 

"I'm sorry," he heard her murmur.

 

"Hey, it's okay," he said and this time, he couldn't fight the urge to pull her into his arms. He wrapped his arms around her back and held her tightly to his chest. "It's okay." His heart pace quickened as he felt her palms lay flatly against his back.

 

They stayed like that for a while, then he felt her breathing slowing and she lifted her head from his chest.

 

Violet eyes met with brown ones and Jon suddenly felt the urge to lean closer and kiss her. The last few days were a roller coaster of emotions. He was angry at her, then relieved when they found each other. Then angry again, then he felt sorry for her. He wasn't sure anymore, but as he stared into her eyes, unable to look away, he was sure she was something else. . .

 

"It's safe," they broke apart instantly when they heard Jaime's voice from the building. "You can come in."

 

"Let's go," Daenerys cleared her throat and motioned for Ghost to go inside.

 

 _Damn you, Jaime_ Jon thought

 

_It seems like torturing me is really that easy. . ._

 

***

 

He started to write a diary in his head.

_Dear Diary_ , he began _. On Friday I had a job, a fiancée, a home and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as a life can make sense.) Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancée, no home, no job, and I'm walking around about a hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal cat who wants to run to the other side of the street right when a car comes._

 

_There are thousands of people in this other London. Maybe even more. People who come from here, or people who have fallen through the cracks._

 

_I'm wandering around with a princess called Daenerys, her bodyguard with a wolf, and her weird knight._

 

_We slept last night in a dusty old casino. Arya was awake when I went to sleep, and awake when they woke me up. I don't think she ever sleeps. We had some cereal bars for breakfast - Jaime had a few in his pocket._

 

Jaime and Daenerys walked together in the front. Jon tended to stay a couple of steps behind them. Arya moved around: sometimes she was behind while Ghost led them, and sometimes to one side of them or to the other, often a little way in front, merging with the shadows while Ghost followed them from behind. The two of them clearly made a team. They made no sound when they moved.

 

There was a crack of light ahead of them. "There we go," Jaime said. "Bank Station. A good place to start looking."

 

"Well," Jon said. "I don't believe that there are flocks of angels wandering about down here."

 

"There aren't," Jaime said. "Just one."

 

They had reached the end of the tunnel. There was a locked door in front of them. Jaime stood back. "Princess?" he said, to Daenerys.

 

She rested a hand on it, for a moment. The door opened, silently.

 

"Maybe," Jon started, "we're thinking of different things. The angels I have in mind are all wings, haloes, trumpets, peace-on-earth-goodwill-unto-men."

 

"That's right," Daenerys nodded "You got it. Angels." They went through the door.

 

Jon shut his eyes involuntarily at the sudden flood of light: it stabbed into his head like a migraine. As his eyes became used to the light, Jon found, to his surprise, that he knew where he was: they were in the long pedestrian tunnel that links Monument and Bank Tube stations. There were commuters wandering through the tunnels, none of whom gave the four of them even a glance. The perky wail of a saxophone echoed along the tunnel.

 

They walked toward Bank Station.

 

"Who are we looking for again, then?" he asked. "The Angel Gabriel? Raphael? Michael?"

 

"There," Jaime said as they were passing a Tube map. He tapped Angel Station with one long dark finger:

_"Islington"_

***

 

_NOTES_

_Hi guys! I've noticed that sadly, the jonerys tag was a ghost town in the past couple of days :(  So I decided to post this earlier than I planned. Luckily, my lovely beta Open_Sky was able to work on it, so here it is! Hope you enjoyed and tell me what you think ;)_

_See you soon! xo_


	9. Mind the Gap

Jon had passed through Angel Station hundreds of times before. It was in Islington, a district filled with antique shops and places to eat. He knew very little about angels, but he was almost certain that Islington's tube stop was named after a pub or a landmark and definitely not after an actual angel. 

 

"You know, when I tried to get on a Tube train a couple of days ago, it wouldn't let me."

 

"You just have to let them know who the boss is, that's all." Arya smirked from behind him.

 

"This train we're looking for will let us on." Daenerys said.

 

"If we can find it." Jaime added.

 

They went down a handful of steps and turned left at a corner. There was a guy, playing the pennywhistle. His jacket was splayed out in front of him on the floor with a few coins tossed on it.  He wore a ragged T-shirt and oil-stained blue jeans. As the travelers reached him, he looked straight into Jon's eyes, and to his surprise, Jon realized that the man could see them—and also that he was doing his best to pretend that he couldn't. Jaime stopped in front of him.

 

The wail of the pennywhistle trailed off in a nervous squeak. Jaime flashed a cold grin.

 

"It's Podrick, isn't it?" he asked.

 

"Yes, Ser." the man nodded, warily. His fingers nervously stroked the holes of his pennywhistle.

 

"We're looking for Tyrion," Jaime continued. "Would you happen to have such a thing as a train schedule about your person?"

 

Jon and the rest listened to the conversation carefully. He glanced at Daenerys a few times, who was stroking Ghost's ears. For some reason, the sight made him warm, it was almost like he felt the comfort the wolf must be feeling.

 

"I– I have, yes," the guy answered.

 

Jaime thrust his hands deep into the pockets of his coat. Then he smiled. "They say," he remarked, "that Mozart once wrote a reel so beautiful that it would charm the coins from the pockets of anyone who heard it."

 

Podrick reached into his back pocket, pulled out a folded paper and held it up. Jaime also pulled out a piece of paper from one of the inside pockets of his coat. They made the exchange then Jaime encouraged the man to play. 

 

It made Jon feel like he was thirteen years old again, listening to the Top Twenty on his best friend's radio at school during lunch hour, back when pop music had mattered as it only can in your early teenage years - the guy's reel was everything he had ever wanted to hear in a song . . .

 

A handful of coins chinked onto Podrick's coat, thrown by passers-by, who walked on with a smile on their faces and a spring in their step.

 

"A piece of advice," Jaime looked back at him as they started to walk away. "Don't overuse it. A little goes a very long way."

 

The four of them and Ghost walked down the long corridor, surrounded by posters advertising films and underwear, and to the sound of money landing on a coat.

 

***

 

A voice came over the loudspeaker, that formal, disembodied male voice that warned people to _Mind the Gap_. It was intended to keep unwary passengers from stepping into the space between the train and the platform. Jon, like most Londoners, barely heard it anymore.

 

But suddenly, Daenerys's hand was on his arm.

 

"Mind the Gap," she said urgently to Jon, with fear in her eyes. "Stand back over there. By the wall."

 

And then it erupted over the side of the platform. It was man-like but cold, the color of grey and blue. It moved astonishingly fast while still seeming to drift almost in slow motion; it wrapped its hands tightly around Jon's ankle. Jon gasped and looked down, where the hand came and his eyes met striking blue ones.

 

The thing pulled him toward the edge of the platform, and he staggered. He heard Daenerys screaming a desperate _no_ , but it felt like it was coming from afar.

 

He realized, as if from a distance, that Arya had pulled out her knife and was cutting the arm with it, hard, repeatedly. The cold hand let go of Jon's ankle and was gone. It disappeared like dust.

 

Arya took Jon by the arm and pulled him toward the back wall, where Jon slumped against it. He was trembling, and the world seemed suddenly utterly unreal. The color had been sucked from his jeans wherever the thing had touched him, making them look as if they'd been ineptly bleached.

 

In the next moment, both Ghost and Daenerys were in front of him. The wolf whined and nudged his face with his wet nose, sniffing as if looking for injuries. All the while, Daenerys grasped his shirt, checking him up and down. Then he put her hands on each side of his cheeks, her face concerned. 

 

"Are you alright?" she asked frantically.

 

"What... " he tried to say, but nothing came out. He swallowed and tried again. "What was that?"

 

Arya looked down then offered a hand to help him up. "They live in the gaps."

 

"I've... I’ve never seen one before."

 

"You weren't part of the Underside before," she said. "Just wait by the wall. It's safer."

 

He nodded and accepted Arya’s right. He stayed close to the wall, then he felt Daenerys sliding her hand onto his. Jon looked at her and smiled reassuringly, which she answered with a big sigh. They remained like that.

 

Jaime checked the time on a large gold pocket-watch. He returned it to his waistcoat pocket, glanced at the paper Podrick had given him, and nodded, satisfied.

 

"We're lucky," he announced, satisfied. "The train should be coming through here in about half an hour."

 

The warm wind began to blow. An Underground train pulled up at the station. People got off and other people got on, going about the business of their lives, and Jon watched them with envy. He wished he would be one of them. But then, a tiny voice in the back of his mind whispered. _"It wouldn't be enough for you."_  

 

"Mind the Gap," intoned the recorded voice. "Stand clear of the doors. Mind the Gap."

 

Daenerys took a look at Jon. Then, apparently worried about what she was seeing, she squeezed his hand harder. He was very pale, and his breath was coming shallow and fast. "Mind the Gap," boomed the recorded voice again.

 

"I'm fine," Jon reassured her. She smiled at him, her violet eyes shone with relief.

 

Gazing back into her eyes and feeling her hand’s comforting warmth, Jon honestly thought - _I really am fine_.

 

***

 

The central courtyard of Viserys and Ramsay's theater was a dank and cheerless place. Ragged grass grew through the abandoned desks and bits of office furniture. The overall impression given by the area was that a few decades before a number of people had thrown the contents of their offices out of their windows, high above, and had left them there on the ground to rot. There was broken glass there, as well.

 

Ramsay and Viserys had come up for a change of air. They were walking slowly around the perimeter of the central yard, broken glass crunching beneath their feet. They looked like shadows in their black suits. Viserys was in a cold fury.

 

He was walking twice as fast as Ramsay, circling him, almost dancing in his anger. At times, as if unable to contain the rage inside, Viserys would fling himself at the wall, physically attack it with his fists and feet, as if it were a poor substitute for a real person. Ramsay, on the other hand, simply walked.

 

"I don't understand," Viserys said in his anger. "I, for one, have had almost as much as I'm willing to take. Almost. We were hired to kill my. . . " he stopped looking for the right word. ". . . family." he finished in disgust. "We were, and now, I can't finish it. I want that bitch dead."

 

"We can't," Ramsay answered. "We were given orders to not kill her."

 

"That son of a bitch. Who is he to tell me what to do?" Viserys snarled. "I want to pop out his eyes with my thumbs. . . "

 

Ramsay shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "He's our boss. For this job. After we've been paid, maybe we could have some fun. When our own time comes."

 

"He's worthless. . . we should butcher him when this is over."

 

A telephone began to ring, loudly. They looked around, puzzled. Eventually, Viserys found the telephone, halfway down a pile of old scripts.

 

He picked it up and passed it to Ramsay. "For you," he said.

 

"Ramsay here," he answered. Then, obsequiously, "Oh. It's you, sir. . . "

 

"At the present, as you requested, she is walking around, free and unharmed. But I'm afraid your bodyguard idea went down like a. . . Gregor? Yes, he's quite dead."

 

Pause.

 

"Sir, we started to have concerns about the role of myself and my partner in this. See, my partner here took your case because he wanted more than anything to see his family dead. But as you know, he didn't really fulfill his wish."

 

There was another pause, and Ramsay went paler than pale.

 

"Unprofessional?" he asked, mildly. "Us?" He curled his hand into a fist, which he slammed, hard, into the side of a brick wall. There was no change, however, in his tone of voice as he said, "Sir. Might I, with due respect, remind you that Viserys and I were the ones to kill the rest of the Targaryens? We are utterly professional."

 

"I liked doing that. . . " muttered Viserys, who had been amusing himself by catching little frogs at the nearby - now out of function - fountain.

 

"My point?" Ramsay asked, almost snarling. "My point is that we are assassins. We are cutthroats. We kill. We don't _let live_."

 

He listened to something, then said, "Well, what about the Upworlder? Something's up with that guy, he was able to see us. Why can't we kill him? "

 

Another pause.

 

"Scare her? We're not scarecrows." A pause. He took a deep breath.

 

"Yes, I understand, but I don't like it."

 

The person at the other end of the phone had hung up. Ramsay looked down at the telephone. Then he hefted it in one hand and proceeded methodically to smash it into shards of plastic and metal by banging it against the wall.

 

"Who was that?" Viserys asked.

 

"Who the hell do you think it was?" Ramsay sighed. "Our employer."

 

"That was going to be my guess."

 

"Scarecrows," Ramsay spat. "We have to scare the little silver bird."

 

"The best way to scare a little bird," Viserys commented, "is to creep up behind them and put your hand around their little necks and squeeze until they don't move anymore. That scares the stuffing out of them."

 

"Don't worry," Ramsay smirked. "You'll have your chance."  

 

***

 

Jon waited against the wall, next to Daenerys. She said very little; she petted Ghost who sat in front of them, she ran her hands through her silver waves until it looked presentable, and all the while she held his hand with one of hers.

 

Jon followed her with his eyes, watching her every move. Whenever she caught his gaze, he fought the instinct to look away. She didn't seem bothered by it, because she flashed a little smile every time their eyes met.

 

She was certainly unlike anyone he had ever known.

 

Jaime had told them where to wait, and then he had slipped away. Arya paced back and forth down the platform, but never too far. After a few minutes, Jaime appeared from an exit-only door and walked toward them. He had a satisfied smile on his face.

 

"Having fun?" Jon asked. A train was coming toward them, its approach heralded by a gust of warm wind.

 

"Just taking care of business," he shrugged. He consulted the piece of paper and his watch. He pointed to a place on the platform. "This should be our train. Stand behind me here, you three."

 

Then, as the Underground train—a rather boring-looking, normal train, Jon was disappointed to observe—rumbled its way into the station, Jaime leaned toward Daenerys.

 

"Princess? There is something that perhaps I should have mentioned earlier."

 

She turned her odd-colored eyes on him. "Yes?"

 

"Well," he said, "Lord Tyrion might not be entirely pleased to see me."

 

The train slowed down and stopped. The car that had pulled up in front of Jon was quite empty - its lights were turned off, it was empty and dark. From time to time Jon had noticed cars like this one, locked and shadowy, on Tube trains, and he had wondered what purpose they served. The other doors on the train hissed open, and passengers got on and got off. The doors of the darkened car remained closed.

 

Jaime drummed on the door with his fist, an intricate rhythmic rap. Nothing happened. Jon was just wondering if the train would now pull out without them on it when the door of the dark car was pushed open from the inside.

 

"Who knocks?" a voice asked.

 

Through the opening, Jon could see light and people, though through the glass in the doors, however, he still saw a dark and empty carriage.

 

"Princess Daenerys," Jaime announced with a smile. "And her companions."

 

The door slid open all the way, and they were inside.  There were seats with hand-embroidered cushions on them, and there were tapestries covering the windows and the doors.

 

An enormous Irish wolfhound padded down the aisle and stopped beside a lute player, who sat on the floor picking at a melody in a not so common fashion. The wolfhound glared at Jon but backed away immediately when Ghost appeared at Jon's side, snapping at the dog. The hound whined, then lay down.

 

Some passengers obviously stared at the four travelers; others, just as obviously, ignored them.

 

A man staggered through the connecting door from the next compartment. He was little, like a dwarf.  He had a scar that ran across his face. There were fragments of something that looked like waterdrops - but judging the place and the smell it was more likely wine - in his red-gray beard, and what appeared to be pajama pants were visible at the bottom of his shabby fur gown. That, thought Jon correctly, must be Tyrion.

 

The man walked over to a thronelike carved wooden seat and sat down with a cup in his hands. The wolfhound got up, padded down the length of the carriage, and settled itself at the man's feet.

 

A man next to Tyrion coughed. "Right then, you lot," he said. "State your business."

 

Daenerys stepped forward. She held her head up high, suddenly seeming taller and more at ease than Jon had previously seen her.

 

"I am Daenerys Stormborn of House Targaryen," she started. "Aerys Targaryen was my father."

 

Tyrion brightened at this and leaned forward.

 

"We were all quite devastated to hear of your father's unfortunate... " he said, and then he interrupted himself, and said, "Well, all your family, it was a...." and he trailed off, and said, "You know I had warmest regards for him, did a bit of business together... he was... full of ideas..." He stopped awkwardly.

 

He then got up from his seat, went to Jon and stopped in front of him.

 

"And who might you be?" he asked.

 

"Me?" Jon asked. "My name is Jon. Jon Snow."

 

"I am called Arya," Arya said. "And this is Ghost."

 

Some people opened their mouths as if they were going to say something, and then looked at her, and closed their mouth again.

 

A hint of a smile played at the corner of Arya's lips.

 

"And I," Jaime said with a blinding smile, "call myself Ser Jaime."

 

"Ser Jaime now, huh?" Tyrion asked. "Ser Jaime the thief? Ser Jaime the traitor? Ser Jaime the bodyguard who failed?" He turned to the people around them. "But this cannot be Ser Jaime. For why? Because Ser Jaime has long since been banished from my presence."

 

The people looked at Jaime warily and a low buzz of troubled conversation began.

 

Jaime said nothing, but his lips were pressed together tightly.

 

"He might not be entirely pleased to see you?" Daenerys whispered to Jaime.

 

"Well, he's not," he muttered back. "My lady, I will obviously be of more use to you off this train than on. And I have other avenues to explore."

 

"No," she said. "If you go, we all go."

 

"I don't think so," Jaime said. "Arya will look after you. I'll meet you at the next market. Don't do anything too stupid in the meantime."

 

When the train next stopped, Jaime was gone. Daenerys’ eyes were fixed on Tyrion – and there was something more ancient and powerful in that look than her young years would have seemed to allow.  Jon noticed that the room fell quiet whenever she spoke. And this, besides everything he had seen her do, only added to the admiration he felt, as well as to that nameless sentiment which started to grow in his heart. Which he just couldn’t place anywhere.

 

Tyrion sat down on his huge chair at the end of the car. He said nothing. The train rattled and lurched through the dark tunnel.

 

"Where are my manners?" he muttered to himself. He motioned one of the elderly men-at-arms to him.

 

"Stop the train!" Tyrion shouted. The doors hissed open, and the old man stepped off onto a platform. Jon watched the people on the platform. No one came into their car. No one seemed to notice that anything was at all unusual.

 

The old man walked over to a vending machine on the side of the platform. He took off his metal helmet. Then he rapped, with one mailed glove, on the side of the machine. A ratcheting whirr came from deep in the guts of it, and it began to spit out dozens of chocolate bars, one after another. The man held his helmet below the opening to catch them.

 

The doors began to close. But someone from the inside put the handle of his pike between the doors, and they opened again and began bumping open and shut on the pike handle.

 

"Please stand clear of the doors," said a loudspeaker voice. "The train cannot leave until the doors are all closed."

 

Tyrion was staring at Daenerys from the corner of his eyes. "So. What brings you here?" he asked.

 

She looked back and licked her lips. "Well, indirectly, my father's death."

 

He nodded, slowly. "Yes. You seek vengeance. Quite right, too."

 

"Vengeance?" Daenerys thought for a moment. "Yes. That was what my father said. But I mostly just want to understand what happened, and to protect myself. My family had no enemies."

 

The old man staggered back onto the train then, his helmet filled with chocolate bars and cans of Coke; the doors were permitted to close, and the train moved off once more.

 

***

 

Podrick's coat, still on the floor of the tunnel, was covered in coins and bills, now, but it was also covered with shoes—kicking the coins, smearing and tearing the bills, ripping the fabric of the coat. Podrick had begun to cry. "Please. Why won't you leave me alone?" he begged.

 

He was backed against the wall of the passage.

 

He was surrounded by a small crowd of people—more than twenty, less than fifty—every one of them shoving and pushing, in a mindless mob, their eyes blank and staring, each man and woman desperately fighting and clawing in order to give Podrick their money.

 

He began to sob and to curse. "I told you not to overuse that tune," said an elegant voice, nearby. "Naughty."

 

"Help me," Podrick gasped.

 

"Well, there is a counter-charm," admitted the voice, almost reluctantly.

 

The crowd was pressing closer now. A flung fifty-pence coin opened Podrick's cheek.

 

He curled into a fetal ball, hugging himself, burying his face in his knees.

 

"Play it, damn you," he sobbed. "Whatever you want. . . just make them stop. . . "

 

The pennywhistle piping began softly and echoed down the passage. A simple phrase, repeated over and over, slightly different every time.

 

The footsteps were moving away. Shuffling, at first, then picking up the pace - moving away from him. Podrick opened his eyes. Jaime was leaning against the wall, playing the pennywhistle. When he saw Podrick looking at him, he took the whistle from his lips and tossed a lace-edged handkerchief of patched linen to him. Podrick wiped the blood from his forehead and face.

 

"They would have killed me," he said, accusingly.

 

"I did warn you," Jaime said. "Just count yourself lucky that I was coming back this way."

 

He helped Podrick into a sitting position. "You're a great kid, Pod, but..." he said. "I think you owe me a favor now."

 

Podrick picked up his coat—torn and muddy and imprinted with the marks of many feet—from the passage floor.

 

"Was it really luck? Or did you set me up?"

 

Jaime looked almost offended. "I don't know how you could even bring yourself to think such a thing."

 

"It's ‘cause I know you. That's how. So what is it that you want me to do?"

 

Jaime smirked, reached down and took back his handkerchief.

 

"I need you to get me something," he said. "I found myself in a rather urgent need of a piece of sculpture... which belonged to Warg."

 

Podrick shivered. Then, slowly, he nodded.

 

***

 

Jon was handed a bar of Cadbury's Fruit and Nut chocolate and a large silver goblet, ornamented around the rim with what appeared to Jon to be sapphires.

 

The goblet was filled with Coca-Cola.

 

The old man cleared his throat loudly. "I would like to propose a toast to our guests," he said. "A Princess, a No One, an Abover. May they each get what they deserve."

 

"In the old days," the man said dismally, after sipping his Coke, "we had wine. I prefer wine. It's not as sticky. Now only Lord Tyrion has wine."

 

"Do all the machines just give you things like that?" Jon asked.

 

"Oh yes," the man answered. "They listen to the Lord Tyrion, you see. He rules the Underground. The bit with the trains."

 

Daenerys came back down the carriage toward them. She was smiling. "Tyrion's agreed to help us," she said. "Come on. He's meeting us in the library."

 

Jon began to follow, as he realized that the question ‘ _What library?’_ had not risen to his lips. The longer he was here, the more he didn't bother himself with these strange things. Instead, he followed Daenerys toward Tyrion's empty throne, and around the back of it, and through the connecting door behind it, and into the library. It was a huge stone room, with a high wooden ceiling.

 

Each wall was covered with shelves. Each shelf was laden with objects – there were books, yes. But the shelves were filled with a host of other things... tennis rackets, hockey sticks, umbrellas, a spade, a notebook computer, a wooden leg, several mugs, dozens of shoes, pairs of binoculars, a small log, six glove puppets, a lava lamp, various CDs, cassette tapes and eight-tracks, dice, toy cars, watches, flashlights, piles of newspapers, magazines, a box of cigars, socks... the room was a tiny empire of lost property.

 

"This is his real domain," Arya whispered. "Things lost. Things that are forgotten."

 

There were windows set in the stone wall. Through them, Jon could see the rattling darkness and the passing lights of the Underground tunnels.

 

Tyrion clambered to his feet when he saw them. His forehead creased. "Ah. There you are. . . So Islington. . ." he started. "Your father had a lot of ideas for changes, you know. Asked me about them.  I sent him to Islington." He stopped and blinked with one eye. "Did I tell you this already?"

 

As Jon watched him, it was clear... _that man's drunk_.

 

"Yes, Lord Tyrion. And how can we get to Islington?"

 

Tyrion nodded and continued. "Only once by the quick way. After that, you have to go the long way down. Dangerous."

 

"And the quick way is . . . ?" Daenerys asked patiently.

 

"No, no. Need to be an opener to use it. Only good for the Targaryen family." He rested his hand on her leg. Then his hand slid up to her hip. "Better off staying here with me. Keep a man warm at night, eh?"

 

Jon felt anger surge up in him and he took a step toward Daenerys.

 

Daenerys gestured with her hand: No.

 

"Oh, a man in love," Tyrion grinned at Jon. "Don't worry, boy, it was just a suggestion."

 

Jon breathed heavily and looked at Arya. She was watching Tyrion with careful eyes, her hand on her knife, ready to act if necessary.

 

"Lord Tyrion, I am Aerys's daughter. How do I get to the Angel Islington?"

 

Jon found himself amazed that Daenerys was able to keep her temper.

 

"Hmm? Use the Angelus, of course."

 

He fumbled on the shelves, moving pens and papers and dead leaves. Then, like a cat stumbling on a mouse, he seized a small, rolled-up scroll, and handed it to the girl.

 

"Here you go, Princess," he said. "All in here. And I suppose we'd better drop you off where you need to go"

 

"You'll drop us off?" Jon asked. "In a train?"

 

Tyrion looked around for the source of the sound, focused on Jon, and flashed a huge grin at him. "Oh, think nothing of it," he murmured. "Anything for Aerys's daughter."

 

Daenerys clutched the scroll tightly, triumphantly.

 

Jon could feel the train beginning to decelerate, then shortly he, Daenerys, Arya, and Ghost were led out of the stone room and back into the car.

 

He peered out at the platform as they slowed down. "What station is this?" he asked.

 

The train had stopped, facing one of the station signs: BRITISH MUSEUM, it said.

 

He could accept the "Mind the Gap" and the library. But damn it, like all Londoners, he knew his Tube map, and this was going too far.

 

"There isn't a British Museum Station." Jon said, firmly.

 

"There isn't?" Tyrion asked. "Then, hmm, then you must be very careful as you get off the train." he laughed.

 

The doors hissed open. Daenerys smiled up at Tyrion. "Thank you," she said as left the train.

 

And then the doors closed the train moving away, and Jon found himself staring at a sign which, no matter how many times he blinked still persisted in saying:

 

BRITISH MUSEUM

 

***

 

_NOTES_

_Hope you enjoyed! Tell me what you think ;)_

_Huge thanks to Open_Sky for the help!_

_See you guys soon! xo_

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos, Bookmarks and Comments are appreciated!


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